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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

Except in Pythonland, "explicit is better than implicit"

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

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?

> 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?

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)

would be the convention. There may be some infra issue with this (and in general, `super` has to be kind of magical no matter how you handle it). But yes, in general I can vibe with "super is too implicit".

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.

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