nex3

The PATH is an important concept when working on the command line. It's a list of directories that tell your operating system where to look for programs, so that you can just write script instead of /home/me/bin/script or C:\Users\Me\bin\script. But different operating systems have different ways to add a new directory to it:

Windows

1. The first step depends which version of Windows you're using:

• If you're using Windows 8 or 10, press the Windows key, then search for and

jashkenas

Spurred by recent events (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244700), this is a quick set of jotted-down thoughts about the state of "Semantic" Versioning, and why we should be fighting the good fight against it.

For a long time in the history of software, version numbers indicated the relative progress and change in a given piece of software. A major release (1.x.x) was major, a minor release (x.1.x) was minor, and a patch release was just a small patch. You could evaluate a given piece of software by name + version, and get a feeling for how far away version 2.0.1 was from version 2.8.0.

But Semantic Versioning (henceforth, SemVer), as specified at http://semver.org/, changes this to prioritize a mechanistic understanding of a codebase over a human one. Any "breaking" change to the software must be accompanied with a new major version number. It's alright for robots, but bad for us.

SemVer tries to compress a huge amount of information — the nature of the change, the percentage of users that wil