Best to use Private methods or Protected methods?

Question

In a lot of my PHP projects, I end up with classes that have non-public functions that I don\'t intend to extend.

Is it best to declare these as protected, or privat

Answer 1

My instinct is to keep them private, until you need them to be otherwise.

It has been argued (sadly I've misplaced the link) that making methods private is antisocial, in much the same way as making them 'final', in that it's fairly dictatorial about how people may use your code.

I'm not convinced, however, and agree that you should expose only what you really need to. The exception would be a library or toolkit, where you'll expect users to want to extend (in the general sense) your code in ways which you would never foresee. In which case making well-chosen methods protected can be seen as providing flex-points.