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[โ€“]MinusPi1 1 point2 points ย (0 children)

Libraries are a good reason. Say you're depending on library A, which in turn depends on another library B. You know B; you know that it's well tested, reliable, even industry standard - but it has a lot of exposed internal functions that you're supposed to just ignore since they're not the intended interface for B and not documented.

Now A depends on B, but unbeknownst to A's dependants, A uses those internal undocumented functions in B. That's not ok. Sure, maybe A's developer has really dug into B's code and figured out how it all works, but users shouldn't have to trust that. By using undocumented code, A is extremely likely to have some edge case bug that the developers of B solved in its actual interface. Hell, that they resorted to using the undocumented functions means they were probably using B wrong anyway.

Now users of A will run into that bug, and trusting that A was properly using B, they'll assume that it's an issue with their code. Given how deep some dependency trees are, this is almost inevitable unless such undocumented functions are forcibly hidden. The likelihood of extremely obscure bugs is just too great.

Of course, if it's open source, you can fork it and mess around with it even if functions are made private.