There seems to be a saint for everything. Saint Lidwina is the patron saint of ice skaters. Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of steak chefs. Saint Apollonia is the patron saint of dentists. And so on and so forth.

But who is the patron saint of version control systems for software development, such as Git, Mercurial and Subversion?

Although Saint Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of computers and the Internet, I nominate Anton Bruckner as the patron saint of version control systems specifically.

Anton Bruckner is an Austrian composer best known for writing nine numbered symphonies that are said to be as long as the ones by Mahler and require orchestras as large.

Although he's not officially recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church, Bruckner does check off a lot of the boxes.

For one thing, he was a devout Catholic who never married, and the sainthood committee seems to value celibacy above lots of other things. The closest he came to marriage was with a Lutheran woman who did not want to convert. I would've said "close enough."

And his Symphony №9 in D minor, which he came very close to completing, he dedicated to God, and prayed to God that He grant him enough time to complete it before dying.

I think God did answer that prayer. Unfortunately, Bruckner didn't also pray that his estate's executor would secure his earthly belongings in a timely manner after his death.

And so a lot of materials for the finale of the Ninth Symphony were stolen by souvenir hunters. Not just sketches, but several pages of the emerging final manuscript for the finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Bruckner's composition process was such that we can reconstruct with a high degree of certainty almost the entire finale of his Ninth Symphony with no original composition of our own, and very little conjecture.

Mythology tells us that Bruckner had a psychological compulsion for counting things. But the reason he numbered the folios of his manuscripts, and the bars in each folio, is that those numbers were useful to him as he worked, just as it's useful for computer programmers today to refer to line numbers in their computer programs.

Some people say Bruckner didn't have enough time to finish his last symphony because he spent too much of the final decade of his life revising his earlier compositions.

Indeed the Third and Fourth Symphonies, which he originally wrote in the early 1870s, are works that he had already revised in the late 1870s and he revised again in the late 1880s.

And the already monumental Eighth Symphony that he completed in 1887 he revised in 1890 in ways that do improve it, in my opinion, but apparently without actually addressing any of his contemporaries' criticisms of the first version.

The confusion sometimes caused by the multiple versions is compounded by spurious editions by his contemporaries. People who wouldn't dare attempt to write an original symphony on their own felt qualified to insert their own musical noodlings into his music, and those inauthentic editions were performed quite regularly almost up to the time of World War II.

But thanks to Bruckner taking cares older and contemporary composers never did, we can have almost all his authentic versions. Maybe Beethoven revised more than Bruckner, but those versions are essentially lost to us even if the actual pages survive.

Where others see a "Bruckner problem," I see a "Bruckner opportunity." If you're familiar with one version of a Bruckner symphony that you like and you want to hear something that's very similar but different enough to be new to you, check out a different version.

Hearing that other version, it all sounds very familiar, though there are little details that you don't remember hearing in the version that you're familiar with.

And then all of a sudden, there's a tangent and you're like "Whoa, where did that come from!?"

The "worst," or best example of this, is Bruckner's Symphony №3 in D minor (seems to be his favorite key). It's usually played in the 1877 version, which is counted as the second version by some.

The first version, from 1873, begins with a simple though quite interesting trumpet theme that helped convince Richard Wagner to accept the dedication (all the Wagner quotations certainly helped, too).

In 1876, Bruckner wrote what feels like a new Adagio to follow the first movement, and that's sometimes called "the 1876 Adagio." But it's not part of the 1877 version?

Also, there's an interesting edit to the Scherzo that sometimes appears in recordings of the 1877 version. The Scherzo runs six to eight minutes in most performances, and listeners familiar with the 1889 version won't notice anything particularly different in the first five minutes or so in the earlier versions of the Scherzo.

But in that special Scherzo edit, almost at the end, the music goes off on a tangent that sounds like unacknowledged inspiration for action adventure film composers like John Williams. It's a tense moment that leads to a very triumphant D major conclusion for the Scherzo.

However, there's still an entire finale to get through, and that revised Scherzo coda makes the finale sound anticlimactic. Bruckner was not going for the effect that Tchaikovsky goes for in the Pathétique.

So Bruckner restored the previous version of the Scherzo and that's what you hear in all recordings of the 1889 version. If Bruckner had lived another decade, he might have revised the Third what could be counted as a fourth time, and restored elements from previous versions.

The finale in the 1873 at first sounds like it contains no surprises for those more familiar with the 1877 or 1889 version. About halfway through, there are some unexpected rumblings and then a crisis; the music sounds like it's about to spin out of control.

But then that's resolved and the music proceeds as listeners more familiar with the later versions would expect it to.

I'm including a Spotify playlist with three versions of Bruckner's Third. Obviously as it lasts more than three hours I don't expect you to listen to it beginning to end once through in one sitting.

Rather I hope that you skip around in the playlist and verify my descriptions of the differences between the versions.

Inevitably someone will write in the comments that they don't like Bruckner. And that's fine. Just please don't say "Because I don't like Bruckner no one should." Most people have enough sense not to say things like that about other music they don't like.

Or someone might comment that most programmers don't like classical music and are atheists anyway. That's more valid regardless of whether or not the statistics back it up.

Or that more than a full century elapsed between Bruckner's death in 1896 and the introduction of Git in 2005. But keep in mind that many saints are patron saints of things that didn't even exist when they lived.

So I stand by my nomination of Anton Bruckner as the patron saint of version control systems like Git.

There's one other snag with this idea: as far as I know, the Catholic Church has not investigated any claims of anyone being granted a miracle after praying to Bruckner (I don't even know if anyone prays to him).

That's what it would take to get the process started. It's a process that can take a thousand years. And who knows if human civilization will still exist in a hundred years.