In a new post to his blog Ivo Jansch responds to some of the recent comments about scoping in PHP applications with some thoughts of his own (someone spurred on by the Symfony project saying that "private is evil").

I don't care much about Symfony as I'm not a user, but it turned to a discussion on OO theory when Stefan defended the position by claiming that you 'should have the right to extend a class's methods if it doesn't support the use case you have'.

He also mentions the agreeing opinions of Marco Tabini and Travis Swicegood. Ivo gives an example of a piece of code that uses all three states - public, protected and private - as a use case for his later statements. In his opinion, removing the private/protected scoping from the picture only helps those looking to make it easier to derive information from the class rather than fine-tuning what can be called.

Be sure to read the comments on this one - there's lots of great thoughts from community members in there.