I can take anything I wrote in C since ~1982 or so and throw it at a modern C compiler and it will probably work, I may have to set some flags but that's about it. I won't have to hunt up a compiler from that era, so the codebase remains unchanged, which increases the chances that I'm not going to introduce new bugs (though the old ones will likely remain).

If I try the same with a python project that I wrote less than five years ago I'm very, very lucky if I don't end up with a broken system by the time all of the conflicts are resolved. For a while we had Anaconda which solved all of the pain points but it too seems to suffer from dependency hell now.

George Orwell was a writer of English books, not a programmer and whatever he showed us he definitely did not show us that small programming languages constrain our thinking. That's just a very strange link to make, programming languages are not easily compared with the languages that humans use.

What you could say is that a programming languages' 'expressivity' is a major factor in how efficient it is in taking ideas and having them expressed in a particular language. If you take that to an extreme (APL) you end up with executable line-noise. If you take it to the other extreme you end up some of the worst of Java (widget factory factories). There are a lot of good choices to be found in the middle.