[swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0159: Fix Private Access Levels

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

> On Mar 22, 2017, at 3:30 AM, Rien <Rien at balancingrock.nl> wrote:
> 
> I am less sanguine about the burden of proof.
> 
> Imo there is no absolute and irrevocable proof needed to accept or reject a change proposal.


I'm sorry, I used an idiomatic phrase which may not be obvious to non-native speakers.

When you say someone has the "burden of proof", that does not mean that they must objectively prove their position beyond any doubt. It means that it's their job to convince you, and absent a convincing argument from them, you will choose against them.

What I mean is that, when we evaluate a proposal, we should assume it should be rejected; it's the proposal's job to convince us to accept it instead. This is true for all proposals, but especially for this one, because it reverts a previous proposal and removes an existing language feature.

Personally, I *am* convinced that we should accept this proposal. In my own personal experience, I found scoped `private` to be occasionally useful, but more often a hinderance. And this review thread has turned up some good, novel arguments on the "drop it" side. Meanwhile, I think that the "keep it" side's arguments are generally pretty weak, and some of them seem to stem from beliefs about Swift that are at odds with my own.

But this is not a clear-cut technical issue and there are larger process issues at stake, so even though I personally endorse the change, I want to encourage the core team to evaluate this proposal conservatively. That's all I'm saying.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
Architechies

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