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 and the English Language" (1946), Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay, Orwell provides six rules for writers: Andrew N. Rubin argues that "Orwell claimed that we should be attentive to how the use of language has limited our capacity for critical thought just as we should be equally concerned with the ways in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the very language that we use." The adjective "Orwellian" connotes an attitude