I can't comment about the original lack of parallelism issue, but the
platform-bashing comment is just gibberish to me. I'm all for cool, inspiring
platforms, and I use OS X and Linux exclusively at home/school, but Windows
has made some headway in recent years and for me XP is quite reasonable as
long as you don't deal with driver writing. The latter is still better than
in WIN95 DDK days, but the toolset (apart from the F#-based tools) is
obscenely out-of-date, just as it was in 1995. Then there are some regressed
pieces of Linux which are quite a reality check given the whole "we support
old hardware" propaganda (steer clear of SCSI tape drives), so for me
personally I have equally many bash-Windows arguments as I have bash-Linux
ones.

Cheers, Kuba

Lets not start a platform war on this thread.  I have *plenty* of gripes with Linux as well.  I was merely digressing, and was sniping at the high cost of platform specific development.  If you want to discuss Windows programming gripes, Joel Spolsky's forum has plenty, even with regard to the idea that things have been better lately.  ocaml+qt does not count.  If you're using ocaml+qt, then you've basically sidestepped the issues with writing code for Windows.