I think that's the point: requiring the user to explicitly pass "self" rather than making it a language keyword mostly just gives the user an unnecessary opportunity to make mistakes.
Except in Pythonland, "explicit is better than implicit"
Wouldn't it be more explicit if there was a designated keyword that objects could use to access their own members instead of implicitly assuming that any first argument to a method is a reference to them, only called 'self' by convention?
Re:OO in Python is mostly pointless
by joshuamorton on Thursday January 28, 2021 @03:12AM
(#25939446)
> Wouldn't it be more explicit if there was a designated keyword that objects could use to access their own members
Not really. You end up implicitly injecting some value into local namespaces instead of having a function that takes an argument.
The implicitness of methods working differently than normal functions > the implicitness of classes passing a first argument to methods.
Should super then also be a method argument?
Re:OO in Python is mostly pointless
by joshuamorton on Thursday January 28, 2021 @03:43PM
(#25948904)
Honestly, I think it would have made some amount of sense to make super a method defined on the base object so that
def __init__(self, x, y):
self.super(x, y)
Ruby generally (I think? I haven't seen much of Ruby code) uses "@" instead of "self.", and "@@" instead of "ParticularClassName." (btw, "self.__class__" doesn't cut it), and it seems to produce no namespace pollution.
Like I said: most of the time, a missing `self` is an error by the user, and so python requires explicit notification both to the language, and to other people, that you're doing what you mean to do, and not just making a mistake.