The problem here is that we add too much extra meaning to version identifiers. In semantic versioning, if you're at 1.38 and want to release a cool new version

The problem here is that we add too much extra meaning to version identifiers. In semantic versioning, if you're at 1.38 and want to release a cool new version with many cool features and a much faster engine, while still retaining backwards compatibility, you're stuck with releasing a 1.39. If you call your new version 2.0, you signify that it's backwards incompatible. We should have two differently-looking version identifiers, one for compatibility-tracking purposes and one for signifying the scope of changes to humans. The compatibility version numbers could look like 2ah4, where the first number is the major version, the letter (or series of letters) is a minor, increasing alphabetically and going to "aa" after "z", and the last number is a patch.