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

[Drew Crawford]

> On Mar 23, 2017, at 10:54 AM, Zach Waldowski via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> It is equally frustrating that those on the opposite side of this proposal keep indicating “just don’t pay attention to it” is an acceptable answer to the language growing an entire axis of confusion to its access control (i.e., a wart) so early in its life.

This is because the anti-SE25 camp advance arguments of the form "you can replace all your private with fileprivate and it will still work". That is not actually true as examples in this thread have shown, but to whatever extent it is *typical* it would imply that the programmer does not need to engage with the "cognitive load" of private at all because they can simply use fileprivate instead. 

I don't find that argument at all convincing, but it does seem clear that if one accepts the premise that private is redundant, there would be no need to learn what it does. I think it would be better presented as "since there is a need to understand what it does, we know it is not redundant."