For a negative example of this, C++ introduced function overloading — which is a static and therefore broken version of multiple dispatch (that calls the wrong “methods” based only on static type information). They then immediately decided to abuse the bitshift operators for I/O — in the standard library, no less. (There are other abuses of overloading but this is the most famous one.) So that didn’t exactly create a culture where people respect the semantic meaning of overloaded functions. As a result, C++ has given function overloading a really horrible reputation. Partly because it is likely to be not actually so what you want because it’s static rather than based on the actual types of arguments, but even more so because there’s no culture of semantic consistency in C++, starting from the standard library itself — you cannot trust anyone to respect the meaning of anything, not even the language authors.
In Julia, on the other hand, we’ve always been very strict about this: don’t add a method to a function unless it means the same thing. We would never dream of using bitshift operators to do I/O. Since meaning is the level where human thinking operates, this makes it reasonable to write generic code that works the way you meant it to: you can call `+` on two things and just trust that whoever has implemented `+` for those objects didn’t decide to make it append a value to an array or something wonky like that. Not that people haven’t proposed that kind of thing, but because of the culture, it gets shot down in the standard library and elsewhere in the ecosystem.
But yeah, it’s hard to see how this would happen because there is nothing technical preventing the same kinds of abuses that are rampant in C++, it’s just the invisible but extremely force of culture.
