[mike_hearn]

Access modifiers are useful, albeit not for beginners. They're most useful in statically typed languages with good tooling where they keep auto-generated API docs and autocompletions clean.

Static methods are useful for namespacing, e.g.

    var instance = SomeThing.fromString("...")

In some languages you can of course make a global free function called someThingFromString which does the same thing, but then (a) it won't have access to private methods so the public API surface gets more polluted with stuff the user maybe shouldn't call themselves, and (b) it won't show up in the right place in generated API docs and (c) it won't show up in the expected place in type autocompletion.

Kotlin has both static methods (or rather companion objects which are an equivalent), and also top level free functions, and when writing it I find myself creating static methods a lot more often for the above reasons.

[devjab]

I probably shouldn't have worded it quite the way I did. Considering I praise Go's access modifiers. What I meant was the "old" way of having lots of them and explicitly having to write them out. I haven't tried Kotlin but it sounds nice.

What I like about Go is the simplicity. Everything inside a folder is a package/module and any method beginning with a capital letter is public while every method starting with a lowercase name is package/module only. Coming from a decade of C# it was such a nice thing.

I do work with a lot of Python where you don't have private methods. I mean, you can set up your corporate environment to "hide" _methods or whatever, but they are never turly private, and static methods are... well... they are basically just namedspaced top level functions.

[1718627440]

Python does name-mangling of private (__foo) methods.