Some thoughts in defense of Go's use of capitalization. First of all, public/private are used in languages with classes. It would be misleading in Go, since vis

Some thoughts in defense of Go's use of capitalization. First of all, public/private are used in languages with classes. It would be misleading in Go, since visibility is at the package level. Second, if Go didn't use capitalization and wanted to keep package level visibility (which I will strongly argue is the Right Thing), there would be choice of having both private and public as keywords and requiring one of the pair to be put before before all constants, package level variables, type declarations, struct members, functions, and methods -- creating an immense amount of noise -- or to have one of the two and make the other one the default. Probably it would make more sense to have everything private by default and public only when prefixed with public… But it would be really ugly and inconsistent. Now it might be possible to get around this with some other convention. Maybe it could be like Python, where everything is public by default but private if it starts with _. Or it could use a different, shorter keyword like 'p' so there's less noise overall… But I think that once you make the decision to have package level visibility, case is the most efficient way of expressing it.