I think the design trade-off was to aid with multiple dispatch, one of the core paradigms in Julia. There, the implicit bind in `x.foo(y, z)` does not make `foo

I think the design trade-off was to aid with multiple dispatch, one of the core paradigms in Julia. There, the implicit bind in `x.foo(y, z)` does not make `foo` useful for multiple dispatching, so their hand was forced. They may have gotten this from the Common Lisp Object System.