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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully they come up with something better than a # prefix for identifying private fields. It seems like a small thing, but it looks clunky and arbitrary. Even _ would be better, but best of all would be adding a keyword or something instead of using a glyph.

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For some time, there was a trend of adding _ to property and method names to indicate “I’m pretending to be private, don’t use me” (I think this happens in several languages, but I only know JS well).

I suspect there’s a risk that if the committee standardised on _ rather than #, it would actually break a load of older apps and content. There’s a good chance the _convention was abused in those earlier codebases.

> `_` would cause compatibility issues with existing JavaScript code, which has allowed `_` at the start of an identifier or (public) property name for a long time. -- https://github.com/tc39/proposal-private-fields/blob/master/...

Why can’t they just introduce a new private keyword, i.e. private let myVar = 0;

The proposal doesn’t even know.

As far as I know it's the standard way in Python.

The # symbol denoting private fields has already been finalized and approved to be a legal part of the language. No going back.

This is all covered here:

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-private-fields/blob/master/...

One more reason to just use Typescript.

Variables are never truly private in the compiled JS though. You can fake it using clever closure techniques but there are still ways to access the vars as I understand it. This is fixing that at the JS level.

I don’t know of any way of accessing lexically bound variables that are captured by a closure if there is no explicit getter.

Typescript is a mostly superset of javascript. Typescript does/will also support # for private fields so it changes absolutely nothing.

Better would be priv.

This is exactly what I came up with, too, because it follows "constant => const" analogy. Why are constants not "$name" using the same perverted logic?!

Yes, _ is much better given its precenses in other languages. I would associate # with a number or a link.

The semantic meaning of "#name" is not private. In fact, the "_" is much more meaningful than "#", which is always used as in the meaning of "number" or "index".

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