'this' can't easily be avoided when you get into OO/MVC patterns ala backbone.js, which have become a necessity for me when working on complex javascript apps.

'this' can't easily be avoided when you get into OO/MVC patterns ala backbone.js, which have become a necessity for me when working on complex javascript apps. That said, I jumped ship for CoffeeScript and recommend doing so to everyone. Everything tricky about 'this' is resolved quite elegantly.