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    I'd toss you more than +1 if I could, as this is the first time private ever actually made sense to me. The lib perspective needs to be used more often, otherwise anyone fond of the (C-like) "absolute control, absolute responsibility" coding mentality might flag it as "protects me from myself". Note that I still used private previously, I just always felt good documentation and a naming convention like _foo to indicate you probably shouldn't be messing with it was equivalent if not better. Being able to deterministically say "nothing will break" is a legitimate, private-only feature. Commented Mar 11, 2016 at 22:13
  • I originally ignored the case of the code of public libraries and frameworks and thought more or less only in terms of "client code". Optimizing the internal implementation is a good example for my question, though I ask myself, if this really happens in reality (especially when many people recommend a class should not be longer than 1000 lines of code). Generally, I like the Ruby's approach, where private is kind of a recommendation: "Here be dragons, proceed with care". Commented Mar 13, 2016 at 19:02
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    @AdamLibuša While this is a much bigger deal if your code is public, it still applies even if you're the author of all of the class' clients. The problem simply changes from certain refactors being impossible to certain refactors being tedious and error-prone. Optimization is actually the least common reason for these refactors in my experience (though I mainly do Javascript), usually it's more like a bug that exposed a fundamental implementation flaw which requires restructuring the dependency/call graph of the various internal bits in order to achieve a truly robust fix. Commented Mar 13, 2016 at 19:11
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    ""sooner or later, you are going to make a subclass of every class" is almost certainly not the case." And more to the point, you will almost certainly not, and you SHOULD certainly not, override every function in a class, and change the usage of every data element in a class. Some things should logically be written in stone for the class to have any meaning. Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 4:34
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    I'd toss you more than +1 if I could => That's what we call bounty @abluejelly Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 9:51