It also gives an indication of whether two things were produced around the same time or not. (Eg. You'd know that Windows 2015 probably wouldn't support WiFi 2019 without support being added)

Now that's just brilliant. It hasn't seen wide enough adoption for this to happen yet, but imagine all the USB standards and processors and whatnot did the same.

That's just so simple it's genius.

"That 2020 motherboard won't run USB 2025"

We really need this.

Please Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. folks reading this. Please.

It's also really nice for convincing people that things are out of date. It is a lot easier to defend targeting "ANSI C" than it is to defend targeting "C89", even though it shouldn't be.

Those firms don't have much control of the rate technology is adopted.

Look at how slow USB-C has been to come on. Look at how 802.11ax has gone nowhere. Or how Intel has been dragging its feet with PCIe4.

Absolutely this. “Hey, this 2025 motherboard runs USB 2020 right?” “Nope!”

> Look at how 802.11ax has gone nowhere

802.11ax is WiFi 6. We can assume it will get somewhere once it gets a fully fledged launch.

Except that your 2025 motherboard will run USB 2025, even though it’s the same as USB 2020. The marketing people just didn’t want to write USB 2020 on there.

But since USB won’t actually Change until 2030 it doesn’t matter, right?

ECMAScript does this (ECAMScript 2015, 2017, 2018, etc) and I also really like it.

Fortran has been doing it longer.. Fortran 66, 77, 90, 95, 2003, 2008, 2018. It really is a very helpful approach.

> Monotonic version numbering is the way to go, and years are the most consistent and best understood mechanism [...]. We should adopt this as an industry.

Absolutely agreed.

In the interest of efficiency, we should probably also truncate it to fewer digits.

Perhaps 2.

Since we're in the first quarter of a new century, this won't cause an issue for a long time.

someone put a website to advocate something like this to replace semver, forgot the url though

> someone put a website to advocate something like this to replace semver, forgot the url though

It's probably CalVer: https://calver.org/

As other commenters have said though, manufacturers probably don't want consumers to have a good idea of just how obsolete their equipment is. The current a|c|b|g|n alphabet soup is working out just fine for selling lots of equipment.

Also, there are likely to be actual manufacturing and engineering reasons why Wifi 2021 will only become widely available during 2024, and those are hard to get across to consumers too.