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by kragen 227 days ago
Caml was developed in 01985, Linux was first released in 01991, and Caml was extended into OCaml in 01996. I don't think the developers were using Linux at the time; SunOS 4 would be my best guess. I didn't work on it, but I was in the sort of internetty environment that OCaml came from, and I was using Solaris at work and got my first Linux box at home. As another commenter mentioned, the command line follows Unix conventions rather than the Linux conventions from GNU.
1 comments
mbac32768 226 days ago
Forgive me for implying the Linux lifestyle and UNIX lifestyle were anything close to the same thing.

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.

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kragen 226 days ago
It's just sort of anachronistic. Caml was no more designed by people deep in Linux life than James Clerk Maxwell was into aviation or Christopher Columbus liked to visit the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They probably would have been, but the timelines didn't allow it.
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mbac32768 226 days ago
Sure. The larger point was about Windows. You would or would not agree that people doing PL research on SunOS workstations (or whatever UNIX) would also not give a shit about Windows?
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kragen 224 days ago
Windows didn't exist in 01985. I mean, Microsoft did release a product by that name at the end of the year, but it wasn't an operating system.

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.

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