[swift-users] Future(of: self.references)?

[Travis Griggs]

I’m trying to figure out how to ask this question without generating flame and heat. Like tabs and spaces, under_scores and camelCase, whether or not one thinks that a message dispatch receiver should be explicit or implicit seems to be highly personal, (I think*) based on where/how you learned programming, especially object oriented paradigms. Personally, I agree with Matt Neuberg and this Swift proposal (https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0009-require-self-for-accessing-instance-members.md). But I recognize there’s a community of others out there that think otherwise, and I’m not interested in trying to convert them to my approach.

What I *am* curious about is is what the core contributors/architects/designers seem to prefer? Is there any sort of consensus, or at least majority, that those doing the core work lean towards? They don’t have to convince me or vice versa. It’s just frustrating when collaborating with open source projects, that in this one area, there’s really no direction I’ve seen come forth.

For example, when Swift was waffling between functional and message oriented, I heard Chris Lattner (and have since seen in style guides) recommendations that if you can bind some behavior to data, you should, rather than leaving it a free function. That was nice to hear, and not just because I agreed. It was just nice to know which way the language would be leaning.