I would prefer keywords because then if you change your mind about what should be public you don't have to hunt around for every reference to it and change its

I would prefer keywords because then if you change your mind about what should be public you don't have to hunt around for every reference to it and change its name. Or, give me a convention where public stuff looks normal and private stuff looks weird, because then at least my JSON serializer will work. In Python you lead with an underscore to denote privateness. You could use interfaces to communicate privateness. If something isn't exposed in an interface, it can be assumed to be private. Or just don't have your compiler enforce privateness. You don't need it. Plenty of languages get along fine without it.