[Baypiggies] Frequently Argued Objections

[Warren Stringer]

On Jun 21, 2008, at 10:37 AM, Sean Perry wrote:
> *) explicit self. Some cowboy hackers find this annoying, but most  
> of the people I have programmed with like it. Explicit good! Most of  
> the surface level complaints -- syntax, whitespace, self, etc. boil  
> down to the explicit good / hackers like implicit religious war.

Yee HAW!  Here, have some beef jerky while I explain why us cowboy  
programmers are annoyed: Self has to be explicitly used yet is  
implicitly passed as a parameter. Second, when counting keywords in  
the standard python library, "self" is the most common keyword,  
beating the 2nd most common keyword by almost a factor of two. I  
mentioned this to JJ, who says that he uses self and non-self in the  
same code base. I would love to see an example where this is useful,  
where the NRO wouldn't suffice. As a mere tenderfoot Pythonista, all I  
see "self" doing is obfuscating the wide open white spaces that I have  
grown to love.

A compromise would be to use dot as self, as in Sun's new scripting  
language (of which I don't  plan to use).  As far as I can tell, dot  
as self would not break the existing code base. And yes, syntax  
highlight could grey out self. But greyed self still spoils vertical  
alignment.

My 2 centavos,

Warren