I don't believe in version numbers, at least to tell you anything other than one release is more recent than another. A significant segment of programmers which disagrees: some people really won't believe that Perl 6 actually exists until someone slaps the mythical 1.0 (or 6.0?) tag on Rakudo.

(Usually I put on my philosopher hat and suggest that, as far as ontological arguments go, existence of a thing usually precedes the need to argue whether that thing looks there in your living room, but programmers have a weird deontological attachment to labels, where it's okay for a beta not to work because it's a beta. Kant's Software Development Process within the Limits of Reason Alone is a long discredited hoax created by bored CMU students in the early '80s.)

"1.0 means stable", I hear. 1.0 means "usable" or "mature" or "complete". Legions of enslaved programmers await that glorious day when we pry open the hatch of their galleys and smite their chains and allow them to use software every commit of which has been public for years. Apparently slapping a version number greater than 1 on something summons angels.

With no small irony do I admit to helping perpetuate the practice of releasing software which does not, in one sense or another, actually exist in a usable form. You've used it too. I use it every day. It gets millions of uses, and (or so you might believe), the entirety of Western Civilization and some of the East too might crumble if Serious Businesses realized that it's not really usable.

This is the most useful piece of software I've ever written. It's even part of the Perl 5 core (and it's been there for years, darn their reckless endangerment of Serious Corporations everywhere)! It's Test::Builder, currently at version 0.96.

If you sneeze at it funny or scrape your chair or if you passed by someone on the subway who owns a ferret or something, it might break and delete your data and set your server room on fire and certainly you can't rely on it, because who knows what evil lurks in the spaces caused by that missing 0.04!

It gets worse; T::B has infected the CPAN as well. We'll have to excise it from every corner of every test module and every build or configuration dependency. You just can't trust its beady eyes. What nine year old can you trust?

I know, I know. You think you can make it work for your platform. You've run its tests and you've skimmed its code and you've looked at its bug queue and you've read its documentation, and you truly believe that—in this one case—you can get by with using software which doesn't exist in a useful, usable form because you're a grown up software developer and you know how to evaluate things for your own purposes. Besides, even RHEL includes it as a package, and you know they're still waiting to see if this desktop computing thing will ever take off. (Sure, maintaining backward compatibility with Hollerith cards is a pain, but have you seen the size of those support contracts?)

You might try that, but you'd be wrong. After all, who are you to decide what might work for your specific environment? You're merely a professional with training and experience and local information on your business requirements and coding standards and your own common sense and good judgment.

Who would ever believe you over a monotonically increasing real number?

The solution is clear. If we want to solve the software crisis, we should reclaim from our hard drives the imaginary software sucking up otherwise valuable inodes. The bad news is that we'll have to delete perl5i (but the good news is that we'll finally be rid of that pernicious iPad).