[Jtsummers]

An OO language that has the ability to do dispatching on types ought to be exercised in that way.

Checking for the types explicitly in your code creates a brittle system. For a one-off bit of code, fine. For anything that may be extended in the future, it's a bad idea and will have to be refactored to become maintainable.

[frankpf]

IMO, having functions that accept different types (when the types are unrelated) is an anti-pattern in most cases, it doesn't matter if you make it more "maintainable" by using single dispatch.

It's fine when you have related types, but in the example `someFunction` accepts both ThisClass and str, which (I assume) have very different functionality.

You see this anti-pattern a lot in dynamically-typed languages. As an example, both these examples are valid and do the same thing in `knex`, an SQL query builder for node:

    knex.select('name', 'email').from('users')
    knex.select(['name', 'email']).from('users')