At the time JS was created, Perl didn't have a this. A lot of the docs and books suggested using $self but a reference to the object would be passed as the first parameter to all class methods and you assign that to any name you wanted.

It's only very recently (as in the last year or so) with a new class system that Perl has hard-coded $self for that purpose.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean $_.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago

Ah. The usually implicit topical "this" didn't even occur to me because I thought, er, this, was about objects. $_ isn't used for those in Perl.

I suppose there might be some parallels with the implicit nature of $_ in non-OO contexts in Perl versus this in OO contexts in Javascript, but, at least to me, that feels pretty tenuous.