“But Mark, why does it matter that some methods are methods and some ‘methods’ are functions that take an object as the first argument?”
Theoretically? It doesn’t; the two are isomorphic modulo a little bit of bookkeeping convenience on an OOP system knowing the method is always associated with the object.
Aesthetically? Because I’d rather fix this shit in an implementation by writing a new function that is every bit the peer of the existing behavior, not “living off in a cupboard somewhere else because I didn’t get there first.”
More than anything else, my career being “fixing this without being able to modify the object” is the main reason OOP has lost its luster for me.
@mtomczak I always liked the idea of the Universal Function Call Syntax from the D language for this reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Function_Call_Syntax
@bhollis Oh yeah, this is much preferable to what I generally see.
I really need to make up an excuse to write something in D. Or Nim. I'm trying to remember: I think Lua supports something similar as well, though it's been awhile.
@mtomczak what I like about it is that it solves the IDE autocomplete problem - type a dot and you should be able to autocomplete all those eligible functions.