> I'd love to see more explicit ACLs on APIs as a general programming language feature.
In that I agree, but per-member public/private/protected is a dead end.
I'd like a high level language which explores organizing all application data in a single, globally accessible nested struct and filesystem-like access rights into 'paths' of this global struct (read-only, read-write or opaque) for specific parts of the code.
Probably a bit too radical to ever become mainstream (because there's still this "global state == bad" meme - it doesn't have to be evil with proper access control - and it would radically simplify a lot of programs because you don't need to control access by passing 'secret pointers' around).
C++ has the PassKey idiom that allows you to whitelist what objects are allowed to access each part of the public API at compile-time. This is a significant improvement but a pain to manage for complex whitelists because the language wasn't designed with this in mind. C++26 has added language features specifically to make this idiom scale more naturally.
I'd love to see more explicit ACLs on APIs as a general programming language feature.