Why should you avoid making class members protected when possible?

Using private access specifiers is generally preferred as it promotes better encapsulation. Encapsulation means that each class should be responsible for its own state and implementation. By keeping members private, a class can hide its internal details and only expose a controlled and well-defined interface through public methods. This prevents unintended manipulation or modifications to the class members from outside the class, thus maintaining the integrity of the class and making it more secure.

When class members are private, it is easier to perform maintenance, refactoring, and debugging of the code. Since private members are only accessible within the class, any changes to them have a limited scope which reduces the risk of introducing bugs. On the other hand, protected members can be accessed by derived classes, making changes to the base class more risky and harder to maintain as you need to consider the effects on all subclasses that may use the protected members.

Using private access specifiers promotes code reusability and reduces coupling between classes. When class members are marked as protected, they are accessible by derived classes which can potentially lead to tight coupling between the classes. Tight coupling makes the code less flexible and harder to reuse in different contexts. By keeping class members private and providing public methods to access and modify them, you create a loose coupling between classes, which makes it easier to reuse code and create modular designs. In conclusion, it is generally advisable to avoid making class members protected whenever possible. Instead, prefer using private access specifiers to ensure better encapsulation, ease of maintenance, and code reusability.