{"id":4,"date":"2008-02-26T02:58:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-26T02:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/26\/this-is-confusing-self-is-not\/"},"modified":"2009-04-30T19:44:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T00:44:23","slug":"this-is-confusing-self-is-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/26\/this-is-confusing-self-is-not\/","title":{"rendered":"this is Confusing, self is Not"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most diction decisions, like choosing the keyword <b>nil<\/b> over <b>NULL<\/b> seem inconsequential.  Sure, n-i-l is probably faster to type then shift+n-u-l-l, but the difference is too small to matter.  Both terms are clear.<\/p>\n<p>However after today I&#8217;m convinced that the C++ convention of using the keyword <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/This_%28computer_science%29\"><b>this<\/b><\/a>, over <b>self<\/b>, was a mistake.  &#8220;This&#8221; is just too common of a pronoun.  It&#8217;s too easy to say something like &#8220;..this is invalid..&#8221;, and leave people wondering if you meant that-this or self-this.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d be interested to know the reasoning behind choosing the ambiguous keyword &#8220;this&#8221; over the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Smalltalk\">precedent<\/a> &#8220;self&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I plan to refer to &#8220;this&#8221; as &#8220;self&#8221; whenever possible for a time, to see if it&#8217;s less confusing, even to habitual C++ users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most diction decisions, like choosing the keyword nil over NULL seem inconsequential. Sure, n-i-l is probably faster to type then shift+n-u-l-l, but the difference is too small to matter. Both terms are clear. However after today I&#8217;m convinced that the C++ convention of using the keyword this, over self, was a mistake. &#8220;This&#8221; is just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5,4,8],"tags":[170,275,405],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c","category-objective-c","category-programming","category-usability","tag-diction","tag-objective-c-10","tag-smalltalk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}