If "self" is a hell, it's such a super tiny small hell that I'm happy that's the worst thing someone has to say about it. I do think it's nice when it comes to class methods vs instance methods, being clear that there is nothing called "self" in the method, etc. Further, it's a nice indication of what OO is at a very very basic level - method organization that takes a self as a first argument.

I kind of like what Ruby did with "@" instead, but dislike some of the other syntactic choices.

Now, say, Python metaclasses -- there's a language feature I don't like.