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Comment by zeroname | Hacker News Reader

It has nothing to do with OOP. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of another OOP language where "this" (or "self") works the way it does in Javascript. There are pitfalls associated with it and I can't think of any benefit that would outweigh that.

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I like the "Python/Perl/Probably others" approach of the self object just being passed as the first element to methods. No magic names.

That would be horrible in JS. All functions would have to have an explicit frist parameter that would be often unused, because you don't know how someone will use the function.

function x(obj, param1) {}

class X {}

X.prototype.x = x;

o = new X();

o.x(123);

Well, yes, you would have to only apply it to methods, as Python and Perl do. I'm not suggesting it's practical to graft all that into JS at this point.

JS doesn't have classes and doesn't have methods. Only objects and functions exist in JS.

Hence why it's not practical.

Good luck doing OOP in JS without `this` with minimal contortions. And to be clear, there is no `self` in JS.

var self = this;

Yes, I know. That doesn't make an assertion about the "pitfalls" of `self` less muddy. It's literally a variable. It's a code smell too, but that's another conversation. Are we calling out variables in JS now? Maybe we should just hold ourselves to bootcamp standards, copy and paste StackOverflow or something like that. Programming is hard, etc.

I find this comment amusing, considering that Javascript's OOP ideas are descended from Self ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) )

Why would you want to do OOP in JS?

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