Yeah, I had the same reaction, it was a very bad strawman: the author had explicitly set the function to be public in the Java example, and then not done so in

Yeah, I had the same reaction, it was a very bad strawman: the author had explicitly set the function to be public in the Java example, and then not done so in the Rust example, and then argued that Rust is safer. But that's absurd: you deliberately made dropDatabase public in Java, which you could just as easily do in Rust by making it pub. The author just opted not to do that in order to argue that Rust is safer. Your argument is fair that the "default" state in Rust is more restrictive, but the difference honestly is tiny. In practice, basically all Java code I've seen always explicitly states whether every function is private, public or protected, that's just how you write Java. Should it be compiler-enforced that you always do so? Maybe, but we're really splitting hairs here.