I feel very much like @gregvaughn (what a great analogy with puppies!), and would also prefer proposal A.
Elixir is very compact and simple compared to OO languages I’ve used in the past, and I love the direction it’s taken, with changes happening more and more in the ecosystem rather than the language. I’m not too excited about the fancier proposals which mean more cognitive load, especially for new users, and may make the debugging more difficult, especially when we’ve reached a stage where the language is supposed to be quite stable.
I would compare this to Dialyzer’s opaque types. They’re best effort warnings, but still provide practical utility, without adding hard walls to the language. I recall playing with OTP libraries like arrays and queue and being able to play with their data structure and easily understand how they’re implemented. It felt amazing to create a queue in the console and see {[], []}, plain and obvious, rather than some kind of <Queue object at 0x2aba1c0cf890>.
Another minor thing I like about proposal A is there’s no repetition, the fact that a module is private or public is visible in that module but doesn’t affect the callers (no require+alias, aliasp, etc.)
