Well, really, Java has a tendency to take these things to an extreme. Like the author of that post I like that C++ gives you a choice.

Of course, usually there's an implicit subject (receiver): this or self. In a language like ruby, which is very very object oriented, and has a similar thing where you always have a receiver to any function call, every instance has a certain set of stuff (the Kernel module) mixed into it that allows for general tasks to be treated as an implicit receiver. It works pretty well for solving this problem on the other side.