[swift-evolution] Make access control private by default.

[John McCall]

> On May 23, 2016, at 3:43 PM, Leonardo Pessoa via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I was just about to mention this too. I think it's interesting that
> one can write a simple application in Swift without having to worry
> (much) about visibility of elements. Please note I'm talking about
> applications not frameworks.

I'm glad this is working for you, because this is exactly the intent.

> I also agree this is good for teachability because you can worry about
> more important aspects of programming (functionality and structure)
> than just the correct visibility (that makes no difference to a
> student until they move to coding a framework themselves).

Right.  I think the phrase Chris likes to pull out here is "progressive disclosure":
the language should allow you to focus on learning one lesson at a time.
Making students write "public" everywhere doesn't make understand good
code structure and encapsulation; it just forces them to learn a magic word.

In fact — and here I'll confess to not being up-to-date on CS pedagogy
research, and if I'm mistaken I would be happy to be corrected — intuitively I find
it improbable that you can really teach encapsulation to intro students at all.
I mean, sure, you can teach the terminology and mechanics, and you can
mandate a particular code style for their assignments, but they won't really
understand the value until they've experienced the problems of code that
*isn't* well-abstracted.

> But I also agree that, to some extent, private may not make sense if
> the default visibility is already not visible outside the current
> module but should that be an excuse to just drop it?

It makes sense for programmers to be able to develop strong abstractions
within a module.  We're not going to drop private.

John.