It's not flamewar material. GVR himself has acknowledged everything (edit in response to @EdwardDiego: most of what) I said. (http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/10/why-explicit-self-ha...) The main contention holding back GVR and 3.1 from fixing this once and for all is that decorators currently need to manipulate the explicit self. From my perspective, it seems like Python decorators are [ab]used to reimplement basic features in other OOP systems, like class methods, and there are elegant ways of getting around this given a shift in certain concepts (like class << self in Ruby). It's odd to me that they were willing to break so much code with 3.0 (by "fixing" strings and Unicode) but a couple decorators held this one back.
>@classmethod and @staticmethod are somewhat important language features
And strings aren't? Whatever, I understand that there are tradeoffs and to people that only use Python, the aesthetic blemishes tend to matter less. To people that use it in the context of other languages, it sticks out like a bad paint job or a prominent stain. This, and many more opinions than I could express succinctly, are on the reddit thread for GVR's post.
@redditrasberry: To make a bad analogy, it's like a stain on your carpet in your front hallway. If you live with it for long enough you won't even see it any more. But to visitors coming to your house it's the most obvious thing. And it's particularly noticeable because the rest of Python is so nice - it's like I'm visiting an art gallery and everything is beautiful and pristine, but there on the carpet at the entrance is this huge stain that nobody has ever cleaned up.
Not sure how explicit self breaks strings? You've lost me on the way I'm afraid.
If we're quoting Reddit comments at each other:
> You may be used to a different kind of magic. Perhaps the magic of a variable called this appearing inside your method, or the magic in which an un-prefixed variable name somevar is sometimes a local but at other times a member variable this.somevar. So it may take a little time to get used to Python's style, but isn't it only because you are used to the other magic?
Explicit self is hardly a burden after about 10 minutes of learning Python, and there's really little objective argument to be made in favour of or against it as opposed to everything else.
You quoted JavaScript as 'not needing it' before, and dear God, JS is the worst of all languages to reference, given how the this keyword is a calling context, which every man and his framework takes liberties with.
How much code did the new strings break, exactly? What code it may have broken most likely benefits from the new unicode treatment, it was the worst thing about Python strings.
Removing self would be a far more massive change - it wouldn't just impact certain strings, it would impact every Python class.
