An alternative in Smalltalk is to just create a “utility functions” class. This leads to awkward things like SmalltalkWorkbench doSomething and SystemUtils do something else. And you have to locate and then code the long reference, which is not as simple/terse as just ‘self’. Probably my favorite “simple solution” to this, that I’ve seen, without doing the more involved solution you lay out (which is of course appropriate for newspeak which wants to embrace the implicit receiver syntax), was the way Smalltalk/X did this. Smalltalk/X has nested classes. So it is common to have a “namespace” class for your application MyThing, and then put your classes in it (and in a package by the same name consequently). This is similar to VisualWorks, but unlike VisualWorks, this “namespace” is a first class Behavior, capable of defining methods/services appropriate for the application, rather than VW’s cold/dead “declarative” namespaces. It’s a rather cheap/simple/easy/cheesy solution, but I found what little I did with it, it worked very well. I would just add MyGame logError: aString messages to my code. This seemed more expressive anyway of using self as the receiver. It instantly identified the method for what it likely was.