My opinion: Use of self is a bad idea

[DamonOehlman]

For a couple of reasons:

1. self resolves to the global window context in the same way that this does, well at least that's been my experience and have been confused by it in the past. Open the dev console in chrome and eval self for an example.
2. It assumes that there is only one item that will have it's context dissociated on callback firing. While this is generally true when you are writing nice clean code, there are occasionally instances where this will not be true.

Like I said though, this is just my opinion...

[DamonOehlman]

Just checked Firefox and self -> Window also...

[joshgillies]

So advocating the use of Function.prototype.bind() as opposed to var that = this or var self = this as a convention?

[DamonOehlman]

I think var foo = this is a reasonable approach, and I definitely do it frequently. Usually though I replace self with something that is more meaningful with regards to object instance. While I'm not a fan of using that it doesn't fall victim to problem 1 so might be ok.

[feross]

You are correct that self resolves to window in the browser. Here's an MDN page on the behavior: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window.self

This module catches the case where the user forgets to declare var self = this and accidentally uses the window.self.

I know no one who would ever intentionally use window.self instead of window, so the following error is given:

Error: Code style check failed:
  /Users/feross/code/standard/index.js:47:3: 'self' is not defined.

I think self is a lot clearer than that or _this. Your approach of naming based on the class is good too, but I still prefer self for consistency.

[feross]

Fun fact: Did you know that self.window.self.window.self.self.self === window?

[feross]

@DamonOehlman Given that there's a check for accidental window.self usage, would you say point 1 is sufficiently addressed?

[DamonOehlman]

Yeah absolutely mate - and thanks for the fun fact :)

[tbranyen]

Can you use standard when writing WebWorker code where you cannot avoid the self global?

Workers run within a global context different from the current window. Thus, using the window shortcut to get the current global scope (instead of self) within a Worker will return an error.

[feross]

Yep.