Angular 4 coming in 2017, to be backwards compatible with Angular 2

Angular 2 was a major rewrite of the most popular JavaScript frameworld in the world. The effort was huge and took a number of years to complete. During this time the product evolved into something completely different from what Angular 1.x was.

Now the core team is gearing up for for version 4 and hope you'd just refer to it and future versions "Angular", rather than with the version number. This is because going forward the versions will change rapidly with semantic versioning, but unlike the revolution - these steps will be evolutionary.

In a blog post the original creator of Angular.js explains the reasoning for the versioning strategy (Semantic Versioning) in more detail:

Changing from version 2 to version 4, 5, … won’t be like changing from Angular 1. It won’t be a complete rewrite, it will simply be a change in some core libraries that demand a major SEMVER version change. Also, there will be proper deprecation phases to allow developers to adjust their code.

- Ok... let me explain: it's going to be Angular 4.0

This is yet another example of how the JavaScript ecosystem is finally stabilising to be a more hospitable environment for creating long running software. So continue investing in learning what you came to know as Angular 2 and the ecosystem of TypeScript and other tooling, but keep in mind that the versioning will change.

It's no secret that continuous breaking changes lead to churn that lowers productivity. So Kudos to the Angular core team for this announcement and approach going forward!

More details in the video where the announcement is made: