Say, someone who has no prior experience with programming, and is at a rather 'young' age (Teen still) wants to get ahead of the game, and start up now, rather than later. Would one go about this by reading SICP? I've seen it linked so many times, I've only got to think it's a start.
There's so much religion about encapsulation that people tend to forget what the actual point of it is.
Thinking on this, I half agree with you. Pythons approach is equivalent to getters/setters. I was blinded by the case where you do not provide explicit getters/setters.
Going out on a limb, I'd say it's because it's a completely different issue and namespacing doesn't have anything to do with private or public variables one way or the other.
I meant name mangling here . Some people name mangle in C because there aren't namespaces.