Self is a little beginner-unfriendly if they have exposure to other OO languages. In fact the OO model in Python, aside from inheritance/polymorphism, IMO provides a rather uncompelling story for why you should use it other than just naked data structures, because its implementation is too close to a dict, and it doesn't offer you good compile time/type checks (or if it does, it's not readily apparent how to take advantage of them) which will lead a beginner to lots of AttributeError