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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

No but this is still bound at call time, so `self` will be foo in foo.play() just as this, so that's basically the same thing + a standard variable assignment to get the setTimeout working.

On a sidenote, I'm trying to get away from using self, and do object.bind in all my setTimeouts. To my mind, it leads to much cleaner code.

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object.bind doesn't look very clean compared to using self.

And in JS is really easy to create an abstraction for this issue:

    function wait(o){
      return setTimeout(function(){ o.action.call(o.this) },o.delay*1000)
    }

To use it like this:

    wait({
       action : function(){ console.log(this) },
       delay : 1,       
       this : this
    });

If you're writing abstractions to avoid bad language features, maybe you shouldn't be using bad language features in the first place.

The nice thing about it is that it allows you to break out of nesting hell while still being prototyped... e.g. window.setTimeout(this.foo.bind(this), baz);

Since .bind is essentially currying, you could imaginably do window.setTimeout(this.foo.bind(this, bar), baz) as well, if foo is dependent on bar (timing out a request `bar' or something like that).

Bind is not supported in IE8 and older versions. You could use the underscore library or another one that haves a cross-browser bind method.

For my particular use case, IE8 is not an issue, but sure, a shim is like three lines, and we did use that before (when IE8 was an issue).

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