I agree. Python was designed in 1989 and it looks like the OOP we were doing in C (without the ++) back at the time. Objects were a struct with data and function pointers and we were passing them around as pointers. Python has self, explicit in function definition and implicit in function calls, and that self is really like the pointer to the struct. By the way, OO languages from the 90s (e.g. Java and Ruby) were designed to always hide that self, both in method definition and method call. They use it when there is a need to tell the difference between instance attributes and local variables with the same name.

Maybe the explicit self was there to make C programmers feel at home. Functions as fundamental building blocks of the language also make C programmers feel at home. Developers got more familiar with OOP by mid 90s so the new languages could jump from functions-first to objects-first.

Isn't Python's functions are just objects with a __call__ method, and such objects has a syntax sugar allowed them to be called like a function.