sajty/ember — comment on commit 73e5736005e157f4c9ce6102d3a923b03480cf68
File:  line 0
By erikhjortsberg:

I think I need to explain my reasoning here a little more, so you don't think I'm just being a dick about it. :)

The longer I've been working with development the more I've come to appreciate clear and understandable code. Way too many bugs and mistakes are produced as a result of code not being expressive enough about its intention. Ownership of instances is one of these areas where I really want to press the importance of clear code.

So, yes, it's perfectly doable to just keep the reference to the instance within the Singleton class. But I very much rather prefer to have the extra semantics of a member field which by virtue of itself makes it clear who owns the instance. Code comments are all good, but they are not enough. People forget to put comments, and also forget to update comments when stuff changes. Better then to make the code speak for itself.