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Comment by lectrick | Hacker News Reader

I think they did something to fix it, but back when I was investigating Python, it was useful to pass references to yourself to everything for some reason, so every method passed like __self__ to itself, it seemed like __self__'s were everywhere. Coupled with how fucking ugly (opinion, of course) double-underscored variable names are, it just did not give me a great impression.

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You're wrong and you confuse two different things.

So called "magic" methods, which are called by Python in various circumstances, are surrounded by double underscores. One of such methods is __init__, which works as an initializer for newly created objects.

The other thing is that all methods, unless otherwise specified, take a pointer to the current object as a first argument. So when defining an initializer that takes no arguments from the user you write:

    def __init__(self): # etc.

I think only __init__ and __name__ are widely used in Python, all the other such methods are very special purpose and very rarely used outside of deep library code.

BTW: Being "ugly" or not is not the best characteristic you can base your opinion of a language on.

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