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Some people like to use explicit self to differentiate methods from local variables. Also, there are consistency issues. Explicit self is required for attribute writers and implicit self can call private methods on parent classes. Personally, I'm not a big fan of implicit self.

As far as I know they're accepting patches through github - fork away :)

It may be superfluous technically, but it could be coding standard on their part to eliminate any confusion. It's not that far of a stretch.