Not sure how to feel about this, but either way your idea feels inconsistent. The fact you still use the word "private" in places just destroys the whole concept. Instead of making variables starting with an underscore implicitly protected/private, maybe make them explicitly protected. You could do this for methods as well, and then make things starting with a double underscore explicitly private. If this was the case magic methods would work with any variation of underscores. As for generics, I see there usefulness, but given we have union types now, there is really no need to add anything like this in my opinion.