Hacker News Reader

Comment by joneil | Hacker News Reader

The title "Angular 4 will be the next version of Angular" had me ready to believe they were announcing another breaking change as big as Angular 1 -> Angular 2. (The blog post's title is "Ok... let me explain: it's going to be Angular 4").

It's much more reasonable though: they're committed to using Semver, so even a minor breaking change (like upgrading Typescript) will bump the version number. So they're expecting the version numbers not to matter as much anymore, similar to how you no longer think of the version number of Chrome or Firefox too often.

And so they are asking the community to just call it "Angular", not "Angular 1", "Angular 2" and "Angular 4". I do feel that this will make it harder to search for information, documentation or libraries specifically related Angular 1 though, if Angular 2+ is now just going to be called "Angular", much like all the Angular 1 specific stuff.

View on HN

>It's much more reasonable though: they're committed to using Semver, so even a minor breaking change (like upgrading Typescript) will bump the version number. So they're expecting the version numbers not to matter as much anymore, similar to how you no longer think of the version number of Chrome or Firefox too often.

That's contradictory.

Once you introduce breaking changes, you require people to update, and old code may not work on new systems.

Then you can't just say "Angular" like you can't say "Python" or "C/C++"

I know what you mean but it's kind of ridiculous to say that "you can't say 'Python'". There's a reason why the project name doesn't change just because you bumped the major version number.

>There's a reason why the project name doesn't change just because you bumped the major version number.

The OP suggested to make an "evergreen" Angular, like an evergreen Chrome. My point is that you can't do that if you introduce breaking changes, because "this will work in C (and just upgrade to a new version if you don't have it)" doesn't work anymore.

Obviously making small breaking changes shouldn't require renaming your language (so PHP4 is still PHP, even though it broke quite a lot of old files relying on register_globals)

You can't call both Angular 1.x and Angular 2.x just Angular because they are pretty much different frameworks. I'm sure Smv is not meant to be used that way.

> The title "Angular 4 will be the next version of Angular" had me ready to believe they were announcing another breaking change as big as Angular 1 -> Angular 2.

I was thinking twice as big ; D

They are moving at an exponential rate... before you know, we'll be at Angular 16.

Does Semver's spec take into account integer overflows?

to be fair, I was hoping they were going powers-of-two on their releases. There's something very knuthian about that versioning scheme.

(e.g., see TeX version numbering)

For clarification, these naming conventions aren't something that was just announced, but have been used since Angular(2) was in beta.

While it's slightly confusing given there is a clear divide between versions 1 and 2, it makes sense going forward to use these names.

Also, technically, there was a name change between v1 and v2, from "AngularJS" to "Angular".

This talk [1] by Rich Hickey seems more pertinent than ever. It's a contrarian stance on semver (which, almost as much as vc itself, is lauded as "the Right way" among developers). He definitely challenged my beliefs, it's likely to be worth your time too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com