Make protected documentation more explicit about differences #13849
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Protected is a common source of confusion for devs coming from different languages to Ruby. This commit makes the documentation more explicit about the differences, so that the use case for protected is clearer.
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k0kubun
approved these changes
Jul 17, 2025
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Protected is a somewhat common source of confusion for devs coming from different languages to Ruby. In languages like Java or TypeScript, it grants access to subclasses for methods.
This is not what it does in Ruby, but it may not be immediately obvious to new developers. If you mark a method as protected because you want subclasses to have access to it, you may never notice the mistake since subclasses already have access to all methods coming from parent classes, including private ones.
I tried to make this aspect of Ruby very explicit in the documentation, in hopes of making it more discoverable and clearer to new developers.