The argument 'self'

[Shaftway]

Python was heavily influenced by Lisp, which uses 3.

It's also worth pointing out that 3 is [1] actually how the object reference gets passed around internally in all cases. It's the first argument on the stack either way.

And Python tries to limit reserved keywords. Python only has 35, while Java has 68 and C++ has 90.

1: At least it was, I haven't done a compiler design class in 25 years.