In Elixir especially, with everything being immutable, I don't really have to worry about state hanging around for my private methods to care about. I wind up j

In Elixir especially, with everything being immutable, I don't really have to worry about state hanging around for my private methods to care about. I wind up just throwing private functions into little helper modules that can be tested independently. As far as benefit of something being private, an API does not have to be maintained if it is private. Once it's out there, you're locked into doing that for the duration of your deprecation window.