Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

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Named variables require the creation of, well, names. Naming things is one of the few hard problems in computer science, and at the extreme ends is single-letter variable names, or variables_that_are_short_phrases, which are annoying to use.

Several languages have usage I'd consider "pronoun-like". Perl has $_ and Bash has $?. Unfortunately, "$?" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and there's some truth to criticisms of Perl readability. That may be related to the the quantity of the that it supports though.

self in various languages supporting OO is a fairly common example of what I'd consider good pronoun-like usage - if I'm inside a method that belongs to a class, what self refers to is accessible and largely unambiguous.

See, I hate the use of self, or this in code. We want to specify things exactly in code, and deliberately adding that sort of indirection seems halfway mad. If forced to write classes, I would much rather refer to the class name from within methods, or something similar.

This is valid Python:

    >>> class Foo:
    ...    def __init__(Foo, x):
    ...        Foo.x = x
    ... 
    >>> foo = Foo(5)
    >>> foo.x
    5

The variable name `self` is a convention as is `cls`. You can name the first argument to a method whatever you please. The same is true for method receivers in Go:

    type Foo struct {
	X int
    }

    func (Foo Foo) Bar() int {
	return Foo.X * 2
    }

That will compile and perform as expected. Not sure about Java/C# but in Javascript you can bind `this` to another variable if you'd like:

    var Foo = {
       x: 5,
       foo: function() {
           Foo = this
           return Foo.x * 2;
       }
    }

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