`self.` is often not needed and therefore better left off. about ruby-style-guide

[ddsferreira]

My thoughts on this matter:

• I believe public interface and protected interface should be self contained.
• To emphasise this I like to enforce self in public and protected methods inside their classes or modules so that their - usage is conscious enough.
• This way the developer is forced to pay for the cost of an extra method exposed in those interfaces.
• Code readability is also improved by showing to the reader the nature of each one of the methods in use.
• Public and protected method recursive calls should be reduced to the bare minimum.
• Refactor code to use auxiliary classes.
• Make intensive use of private methods.
• By doing it we will be using self explicitly only in limited situations.

[bbatsov]

This is not something that's specific to Ruby and I've rarely seen someone coding like this in Ruby. That said - send me a pull request with your suggestions and I'll consider it for inclusion.

[KL-7]

I don't see it too often, but often enough to get a bit annoyed.

Seems like most of the ruby programmers tend to omit self unless it's absolutely necessary (e.g., when using an attribute writer), but some relatively new rubist use self everywhere either for the sake of readability (I'd argue that it has the opposite effect) or just because of the habit developed while working with some other language (e.g., python).

As it's an open choice for a newcomer I think the established way of dealing with self's worse mentioning in the style guide.

@marcandre, are you going to create a pull request?

[marcandre]

@KL-7 Agreed. More explicit is not necessarily clearer. If you can do it, that would be great, otherwise I will at some point.

The codebase I'm working on is full of redundant self., which is why I opened the issue in the first place. Indents are tabs too, so...

There are also a lot of nil? and ! blah.nil?, same idea here, unless one wants to distinguish between false and nil?, I feel it's better to leave these off. I guess I'll open another issue?

[philc]

+1. It would help to take a position on the usage of self, with some rationale. I've seen it used a lot.

[meh]

+1.

[marcandre]

Ok, finally got around writing some stuff up. Let me know what you guys think.