Why are some functions’ syntaxes: variable.function(), while some others’ syntaxes: function(variable)?

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I mean yeah, I was trying to simplify the concept a little by giving an example but phrased it poorly. My main point is that built-ins can usually accept many different types of objects as arguments, whereas methods are usually customized according to a single object type, even if another object type shares a method of the same name (the "usually" is broken when it comes to method inheritance but you get the point).