- design lessons from the best programming language of all time that everyone loves (not really)

+ access modifiers as labels (`private:`, `protected:`, and `public:`)

    - although Java and C#'s approach to symbol privacy may be verbose, it has one great advantage: it is stateless.

    - the way they're implemented in C++, it's essentially a bit more parsing state you have to keep track of

        - and you know what other parsing state you have to keep track of in C++? - that's right, the preprocessor.\
        access modifiers, like all tokens, are affected by the preprocessor, and you have to take that into account

            - take the following example:
            ```cpp
            class ComfyZone
            {
                std::vector<SoftBed> _soft_beds;

            #if ENABLE_HUGS

            public:
                void hug(Person& person);

            #endif

                int _remaining_hugs = 10;
            };
            ```

                - although quite contrived, it illustrates the problem pretty well

                    - (before you ask, `_remaining_hugs` needs to be always present because it has to be (de)serialized no matter if hugging functionality is compiled in. otherwise we'd get data loss.)

                - we intended for `_remaining_hugs` to be private, but if hugs are enabled, it becomes public.

                    - this can be _very_ hard to spot if you have a big class with lots of declarations inside.

            - this can be worked around by banning access modifiers from appearing in `#ifdef`s, but you have to *realize* that this might happen

                - and I've seen instances of this exact thing occurring in the Unreal Engine codebase, which is *full* of long lists of declarations (made even longer by the prevalence of `UPROPERTY()`s)

    - even if we didn't have the preprocessor, that access modifier is state _you_ have to keep track of

        - I very often find myself needing to scroll upward after <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>-clicking on a field or function declaration, just to find out if I can use it

            - (thankfully IDEs are helpful here and Rider shows you a symbol's visibility in the tooltip on hover, but I don't have Rider on code reviews)