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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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"We wanted it to work like Perl," said someone who should have been killed on the spot.
At the time JS was created, Perl didn't have a this. A lot of the docs and books suggested using $self but a reference to the object would be passed as the first parameter to all class methods and you assign that to any name you wanted.
It's only very recently (as in the last year or so) with a new class system that Perl has hard-coded $self for that purpose.
I mean $_.
Ah. The usually implicit topical "this" didn't even occur to me because I thought, er, this, was about objects. $_ isn't used for those in Perl.
I suppose there might be some parallels with the implicit nature of $_ in non-OO contexts in Perl versus this in OO contexts in Javascript, but, at least to me, that feels pretty tenuous.
Yeah, this is that.
const that = this;
Rust: do you mean Self or self?
this is commonly used with a similar meaning to self in cases where self can't be used because it is a reserved keyword.
Example:
fn poll_next(self: Pin<&mut Self>, cx: &mut Context<'_>) -> Poll<Option<St1::Item>> {
let this = self.project();
this.inner.poll_next(cx)
}
https://github.com/rust-lang/futures-rs/blob/master/futures-util/src/stream/select.rs#L113-L116
Any language feature with such a long definition is a bad language feature.
The less such features, the better the language.
Thus, javascript is not a "good" language for expressing your programs.
let self = this;
I did not know that about event handlers, that is actually super convenient
In python self is just a convention, you can call it whatever you want :)
and don’t ever pull the mask off by reading the descriptor and meta object protocol.