On the other hand, you could get ocaml for Windows from Microsoft ever since 2005.
One of the things people often neglect to mention in their love letters to the language (except for Anil Madhavapeddy) is that it actually feels UNIXy. It feels like home.
> it actually feels UNIXy. It feels like home.
They use single dashes for long options.
This is not home.
Normally the Unix/GNU opposition is irrelevant at this point, but you managed to pick one of the few significant points of difference.
Short options were a compromise to deal with the limits of the input hardware at the time. Double dashes were a workaround for the post-dash option car crash traditional Unix tooling allows because teletypes were so slow. There is nothing particularly Unixy about any of these options other than the leading hyphen convention.
OCaml using single hyphens is not un-Unixy.
I will turn in my Plan 9 install media and my copy of The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System at the nearest DEC service center.
I remember that in 01998 or 01999 I asked Andrew Tanenbaum, a different European CS professor, what he thought about Linux. His impression was still that it was some kind of hobbyist project for people who (paraphrasing here and reading between the lines) couldn't afford a real computer. So I suspect that, even when Caml became OCaml, its developers saw Linux as belonging to the same crowd as Microsoft Windows, rather than to the systems they were used to.
But even that Windows/Unix OS dichotomy didn't exist when the programming language was designed. They might have been thinking about Unix vs. VMS, or Unix vs. GCOS, or Unix vs. Oberon, or BSD vs. System V, but definitely not Linux vs. Windows.
just to give an idea how bad, until recently, you could not just go to ocaml.org and download ocaml for windows, you had to either download one for mingw or wsl
so for many it was just not installable, i.e. for many we didnt have ocaml for windows, until very very recently