# Method definition overwritten warning for functions with default arguments

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/method-definition-overwritten-warning-for-functions-with-default-arguments/1710>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** question\
**Created:** [January 26, 2017, 10:28pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/method-definition-overwritten-warning-for-functions-with-default-arguments/1710 "2017-01-26T22:28:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 14

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Tamas\_Papp](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tamas_papp/32/25949_2.png) [@Tamas\_Papp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tamas_Papp)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2017, 9:44am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/method-definition-overwritten-warning-for-functions-with-default-arguments/1710/14 "2017-01-28T09:44:47Z")

</div>

> [@essenciary](#):
>
> As Julia will go mainstream it will be more and more about higher level frameworks and DSLs and books about these, and less about Julia itself. Ask yourself how many Rails users (not contributors) have read the ruby manual?

This argument (Julia did something I didn’t expect; this will be a problem when it goes mainstream, because my expectations describe the general population, so you should change the language) comes up here very often, many times each week.

Seemingly, there is a tradeoff between minimizing surprise for users coming with various prior histories of programming languages, and coming up with a small, easy to understand, consistent set of rules (which of course one has to learn, there is no way around that). But when these things are discussed, it turns out that people have a wide variety of intuitions about how things should work (because they worked that way in R/Matlab/Python/Ruby/…), so there is usually no DWIM solution that dominates the simple, consistent set of rules solution. See eg this thread and comment:

> [@A != b != c](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-b-c/1347/15):
>
> I think you’re getting at the real problem with this kind of discussion: people don’t all have the same intuitions, so debating intuitions doesn’t generally lead to any improvements in language design.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/method-definition-overwritten-warning-for-functions-with-default-arguments/1710)._