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 living conditions of the poor in northern England, and class division generally) and "Homage to Catalonia". According to Irving Howe, Orwell was "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson." Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is often compared to "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of