Following up on Arnold Kling’s observation about non-general-purpose languages, Seth Schoen reminds us that Orwell’s 1984 featured a language called “Newspeak,” in which it was supposedly impossible to express subversive thoughts. Seth offers this quote from 1984:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been
devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English
Socialism. […]

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought
impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been
adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical
thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles
of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far
as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so
constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression
to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to
express, while excluding all other meanings and also the
possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. […]

Though I’m happy to grant Orwell some literary license here, I doubt that Newspeak could really exist. At least, I don’t see how it could exist as a language for everyday use. Yes, language can guide and channel thought in dangerous ways. But it’s hard to imagine a workable language that makes it impossible to speak frankly about politics.

In a previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer,” I asked readers for help in finding a way to explain to non-techies why non-general-purpose computers are so vastly inferior to general-purpose ones.

Many readers responded with good suggestions. But Arnold Kling’s explanation is by far the best:

Trying to design a limited-purpose computer is like trying to design a limited-purpose spoken language. Imagine trying to design a language that can express only some thoughts but not others.

This seems to be a nearly perfect analogy. It’s technically sound, in the sense that the instruction set of a computer is really a language. And it conveys accurately the computer scientists’ intuition for why general-purpose computers are so valuable.