Years ago, I tried to teach myself Ruby because Rails was all the rage. But I could not, for the life of me, remember which symbol means private, which meant p

Years ago, I tried to teach myself Ruby because Rails was all the rage. But I could not, for the life of me, remember which symbol means private, which meant protected, which meant public. There was no affordance to the symbols, and I have never seen any other OOP language that does that. And then I moved on to Python and Django, and found the lack of real private/protected/public in the Python world utterly liberating. The more I programmed in Python, the more I appreciated “we’re all consenting adults”. The more I thought about it, the less reason I find in trying hide anything via protected/private. For example, if I understand correctly, in .NET/Java, anybody with enough determination (and runtime permission) can use your protected/private stuff via reflection anyway.