Orwell (programming language) Orwell (programming language) Orwell is a small, lazy-evaluation functional programming language implemented principally by Martin Raskovsky and first released in 1984 by Philip Wadler during his time as a Research Fellow in the Programming Research Group, part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Developed as a free alternative to "Miranda", it was a forerunner of "Haskell" and was one of the first programming languages to support list comprehensions and pattern matching. The name is a tribute to George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the year in which the programming language was released. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, most of
George Orwell "self-interested." Literary critic James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "Orwell was on the humanist side, of course—basically an unmetaphysical, English version of Camus's philosophy of perpetual godless struggle." Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular. He found the church to be a "selfish [...] church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. In their 1972 study, "The Unknown Orwell", the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at