May 25, 2024 — I just pushed version 93.0.0 of my language Scroll. Version 93!

Why so many versions? I use Tom Preston-Warner's Semantic Versioning (2011).

In particular, I followed his advice in Major Version Numbers are Not Sacred.

Pushing so many major versions was no big deal because Scroll was a toy.

But Scroll now has a novel feature that makes it very useful.

I need to decide if I should ship fewer major versions with higher quality.

Let's do some research on what other programming language developers are doing.

I added version number data to over 600 languages in PLDB.

Wow! No languages in the top 400 have surpassed 30 major versions.

Erlang, at version 27, ranks #34 and is the only top 100 language with more than 25 major versions.

My language, at version 93, is a huge outlier. Maybe I've done something wrong 😳.

Let's plot version number by rank.

We can see that there is a positive correlation between how many major versions a language has and how popular it is.

However, we can also see that 5 of the top 10 languages are on version 5 or less.

We can also see that ~15 of the top 25 languages are on version 5 or less.

If you have a great model of your core ideas, you can ship fewer major versions.

No. As you can see:

TIL I did SemVer wrong. In particular, I missed this part:

If you’re changing the API every day you should...still be in version 0.y.z

Whoops!

It took me about 5 years to figure out what Scroll 1.0.0 should be. I should be on version 0.93.0, not version 93.0.0.

No big deal. I will soon release Scroll 100.0.0, and from then on will have far fewer major releases.

An ounce of deep thought on the core of your language is worth a pound of major releases!

• I learned 97.5% of languages with a version system use Semantic Versioning. The ~2% of languages, such as C and C++, that are still doing versions like C17 (which does not mean major version 17, but refers to the year the revision came out), maybe want to reconsider ;).
• I learned most languages use git tags for tagging their releases. Something I should start doing.

I learned a few things today. Hope you did too!