Why to use "_this" as a reference to "this"?

I personally use t to store my reference to this.

I understand that self resembles PHP or PERL, but it is not the same thing. It’s bad. that is even worse…

…but why _this? It looks similar to “private” variables. It’s at least confusing…

I’m puzzled in here 😃 Plese explain.

[ssorallen]

_this was originally chosen because Airbnb used a mix of CoffeeScript and JavaScript, and the CoffeeScript fat arrow, =>, created a reference like var _this = this in the compiled JS. Rather than choose another convention, the JS guide adopted the CS convention.

History aside, window.self exists in all browsers, and so it is available by just referencing self in JavaScript. For that reason alone, I would stay away from using self.

@serbanghita makes good arguments for _this. Choose something and be consistent, but pick something more descriptive than t! Future developers who look at your code will thank you.

[serbanghita]

@op1ekun - I didn’t understand the part with “Perl and PHP”. I don’t know Perl, but in PHP the only system variables of importance that contains self are $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] which refers to the current url path, and self:: used in a context of a class (with static methods).

1. self is ok because it has a context, just like this in JavaScript.
2. _this is ok because you can see it references this but it has a different context inside the current function.
3. t is failing at every level. 👎 ☺️