In writing up the 2018 roadmap blog post draft, some of the writing led me to consider “era” as an alternative to “epoch”. While they’re considered synonyms, they have a distinct flavor for native speakers:

Era feels a bit less like a “strong break”, and more like the natural passage of time and evolution. In particular, it feels natural to talk about the “Rust 2015 era” when referring to how code was written shortly after 1.0.

In addition, era doesn’t suffer from the pronounciation issues we’ve hit with “epoch”, and overall has a friendly and more approachable flavor.

The blog post is now expected to go out on Monday, and we need to settle the question before then. At the moment, the core team pretty strongly leans toward “era”, and anecdotal data from folks not deeply steeped in the Rust community suggests that “era” feels more approachable. OTOH, at least at the moment, “epoch” is winning @carols10cents’s highly scientific Twitter poll.

The core team is interested in getting feedback before Monday. Please do not use the thread to re-litigate the concept of epochs or the versioning strategy, but stay focused on the immediate bikeshed.