Saying it's unnecessary is incorrect, and I don't agree about it being cumbersome either. On the first point, how would you disambiguate between reading from an

Saying it's unnecessary is incorrect, and I don't agree about it being cumbersome either. On the first point, how would you disambiguate between reading from an attribute and reading from a global (or non-local) variable? How would you disambiguate between assigning to a variable and assigning to an attribute? You'd have to explicitly declare all your variables (making other things cumbersome instead) or accept that the semantics of your program could change during run time, depending on the contents of outer scopes (which I doubt you'd find an acceptable option). This is the main reason the 'with' statement is deprecated in JS. C++ can get away with implicit 'this' because it has static dispatch and all variables are explicitly declared anyway. But truth be told, I'd remove it from C++ too if I could. I like the clarity of knowing at call site whether something is a function or a method call without having to look it up. Paying for it the price of having type a few more characters has never bothered me. And I somewhat like that I can name my 'self' argument whatever I like instead of having to resort to obtuse workarounds like 'var that = this;'. Not that I've ever had the need to take advantage of that possibility in Python, but it's comforting to know it's there.