On 10/16/2015 07:19 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
I do not speak for any of the core D devs, but ... I never understood
this fixation on conformity. Is there concrete, non-anecdotal evidence
for people turning away from D because it has "strange" version numbers?
That seems an awfully poor and irrational excuse to reject a language.
You may as well recommend that we should avoid version numbers
containing 5, 13, and 666 because it might turn away superstitious
potential users. How does that have anything to do with *real*
marketing?
On the contrary, the accepted wisdom is that *differentiating* your
product is generally a wiser business decision than conforming
willy-nilly to your competitors.
I can see a reason for adopting a *consistent* and *predictable*
versioning scheme -- it lets people know what's a stable release, what's
an interim release, what's a major change, what's a minor change, etc.,
and is useful for migration planning and such. *That* I consider a good
marketing strategy. But I don't understand what's with the fixation
that it must be *this* particular scheme with *this* particular set of
numbers, as if somehow the fact that the Big Boys, whoever they are,
chose some particular versioning scheme, magically endows that scheme
with miraculous marketing properties.
If we were starting from scratch, I could see the rationale for adopting
a "standard" versioning scheme... but why now, so late into the game,
and why version numbers, of all things, when there are far more
important matters at hand?
Yea, +1 here
Not to mention, if you want to talk about the truly Big Boys, even
Windows doesn't follow any of the proposed versioning schemes (I mean,
what's up with 3.0 -> 3.1 -> 95 -> 98 -> 2000 -> XP -> 7 -> 8 -> 9... ?
Fixed:
... -> 3.1 -> 95 -> 97^H^H98 -> Me -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10
\-> 4 -> 2000 -> Server 2003 -> ...
That doesn't even follow any logical numerical ordering!), yet you have
to admit its marketing is far more successful than D can probably dream
of being. Does that mean that we should change D's versioning scheme
every 5 years in order to remain successful?
If we really want to be hip and cool we should follow the brilliant
versioning schemes from Debian and Apple:
Woody -> Sarge -> Etch -> Lenny -> Squeeze -> Wheezy -> Jessie -> Stretch
Puma -> Jaguar -> Panther -> ... -> Lion -> Mountain Lion -> Mavericks
-> Yosemite -> El Capitan
For bonus "cool" points, we can force everyone to memorize two
completely *separate* versioning schemes for the same product, one
numerical and one unordered and nonsensical, and make everyone memorize
how each of the two version names for each release line up with each other.
SemVer is very good. But aside from that, all this worrying over version
numbers, and changing DMD's scheme, is all just "Fire and Motion":
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
