I'm still a Julia newbie, but have been lurking around long enough to know that a common answer for questions like this is...
*You can have the behavior you want via a fairly straightforward macro.* In this case, the macro would simply take object.f(args) and replace it with f(object,args), which is pretty much what Matlab does. This may be a bad idea for reasons I'm not yet aware of (but would like to learn), but hope it helps a little.
