[Baypiggies] Frequently Argued Objections
Warren Stringer
warren at muse.com
Sat Jun 21 20:18:12 CEST 2008
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
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