> I thought that privileging the first argument of a function, which is all that separates a method from a function, was understood to be an ugly hack. I though

> I thought that privileging the first argument of a function, which is all that separates a method from a function, was understood to be an ugly hack. I thought that this was acknowledged now, and only legacy languages are stuck with it. Julia, Rust and Go don't do this. So it's going out of fashion and becoming legacy. [emphasis added] What? Go has methods which "privilege" the first argument to functions: https://go.dev/tour/methods/1 https://go.dev/tour/methods/1 func (v Vertex) Abs() float64 { return math.Sqrt(v.X*v.X + v.Y*v.Y) } Though it moves the argument out of the argument list and between the func keyword and method name. Rust also has a notion of methods: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/fn/methods.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/fn/methods.html Were you thinking of other languages?