The right way to 'call' a class attribute inside the same class

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Erik <python at lucidity.plus.com> wrote:
> Yes, in that case there is (I didn't grok that you meant using 'new' by
> "calling a function as a constructor", but it's obvious now you spell it
> out).

Yeah. I thought that I got that terminology from MDN, but I can't find
it now, so it must have been from elsewhere.

> I wish I could find the resource I originally learned this stuff from,
> because it's quite enlightening and I'd like to link to it here - if one
> understands how things work generally under the covers it all makes much
> more sense, but I guess that's also a bad advert for a language (and why a
> lot of people get confused at first, and why it's a bit of a mess ;)).

Sounds like how Michael Schwern introduces his "Git for Ages 4 and Up"
talk - git may have a pretty poor UI, but has such beautiful innards
that it's best to understand it in that way. And he agrees that this
isn't how you _normally_ want to do things. When I explain Python, I
don't start by explaining the byte code interpreter or the operand
stack :)

ChrisA