Well now hold on a sec there, chief. Again - I'm not a programmer. But the system as it exists is perfectly parseable by me. Windows 3.0 was very different than Windows 2.0, and Windows 3.1 was a major improvement over Windows 3.1. Windows 3.11 was a refinement of Windows 3.1 and then the marketers got ahold of it and gave us 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10.

The correct way to practice semantic versioning is without any version strings at all, just Rich Hickey's directive: if you change behavior, rename.

It seems that you're saying Rich Hickey is A-OK with Microsoft's market-versioning scheme (which, by the way, has devolved into nonsense) while the rest of the world totally gets that 3.1.2 build 8 is ahead of 3.1.1 but is not a stable version of 3.1.2. More than that, you're arguing that if the totally logical, totally deducible hierarchy that everyone else changes because it doesn't work in your corner case and I can't agree with that.

OS X 10 beta: Kodiak

OS X 10.0: Cheetah

OS X 10.1: Puma

OS X 10.2: Jaguar

OS X 10.3 Panther (Pinot)

OS X 10.4 Tiger (Merlot)

OS X 10.4.4 Tiger (Chardonnay)

OS X 10.5 Leopard (Chablis)

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

OS X 10.7 Lion (Barolo)

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (Zinfandel)

OS X 10.9 Mavericks (Cabernet)

OS X 10.10: Yosemite (Syrah)

OS X 10.11: El Capitan (Gala)

macOS 10.12: Sierra (Fuji)

macOS 10.13: High Sierra

This is the best(worst) of both worlds - I know beyond a reasonable doubt that 10.13 came out after 10.12 while marketers can trumpet the wonders of "High Sierra." But god help you if your mother asks why she needs to upgrade from a beach to a mountain in order to keep Quicken working. Also, why is 10.6 snow leopard but 10.7 is lion? Is 10.6 actually 10.5.5 but 10.7 is... 10.6?

Maybe we should just call it "Gumpy Gnu" or whatever. 17.04, I'm told, is "Zesty Zumpus" or some dumb thing but 17.10 is Artful Aardvark, which anybody with any sense will know is more advanced than Dapper Drake because it's been 10 years.

And yeah - I know that if I update the version of anything it's likely to break something. After all, I've got three macs and a PC in the house. And when I know that Path Finder is approved through 10.12, I'm not about to update to 10.13 until I know beyond a reasonable doubt that the software I depend on works with it.

It's a lot easier to know that 10.12 is after 10.11 than to know that Sierra is after El Capitan.