I think there was no conscious decision to make find differently. I have no references apart from this email excahnge, but from what I recall (having used find since the mid eightees):

What you have to realise is that there was no standard to begin with for specifying options and arguments (as command line arguments to programs). Different programs implemented different ways of doing things. At some point the single dash for options and non-dash for arguments became reused/copied from often used commands, and version of getopt became available, both for shells as well as for versions in C. ( I remember having had to compile my own version because the *nix I worked on did not have it in a library).

Of course the single dash, single character options fitted the tty restrictions (the same that leads to shortened commands (cp vs. copy), but where not self explanatory. The developers of find probably chose to lengthen the option single character for more clarity as well as more than the 26 lower-case character options. They did so before the double dash -- for long options became popular (mid ninetees IIRC).

The original man page had the following at the bottom:

BUGS The syntax is painful. 

I think there was no conscious decision to make find different. I have no references apart from this email exchange, but from what I recall (having used find since the mid eightees):

What you have to realise is that there was no standard to begin with for specifying options and arguments (as command line arguments to programs). Different programs implemented different ways of doing things. At some point the single dash for options and non-dash for arguments became reused/copied from often used commands, and version of getopt became available, both for shells as well as for versions in C. ( I remember having had to compile my own version because the *nix I worked on did not have it in a library).

Of course the single dash, single character options fitted the tty restrictions (the same that leads to shortened commands (cp vs. copy), but where not self explanatory. The developers of find probably chose to lengthen the option single character for more clarity as well as more than the 26 lower-case character options. They did so before the double dash -- for long options became popular (mid ninetees IIRC).

The original man page had the following at the bottom:

BUGS The syntax is painful.