That’s another example of Julia trying to be perfect. If a similar effort is being exerted to make it simple, Julia can place itself in the Top 5 list in just a few years. Before 0.7, this question wouldn’t have been asked. I mentioned this point in a previous long thread.
Past century languages allowed A + 1 by default without complaining. Fortran, Matlab, R, Numpy, APL, Perl, and others were created and used by genius mathematicians and no one, AFAIK, complained about adding a scalar to an array. My comment may seem negative but I love Julia and I try to be honest. These tiny perfections can accumulate and yield a perfect language that no one likes to use. The moral of the story? Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, and putting the end-user in focus, always choosing the good approximation approach.