Practical uses for method signatures work in Java

Let's say I had a simple method that said "hello some person's name". It could look like this:

public String greeting(String name) {
   return "Hello " + name;
}

Now let's says I wanted to allow my program to change the language of the greeting or how I greet you. I could just create another greeting() method, but this time add a variable that represents my greeting:

public String greeting(String name, String greeting) {
   return greeting + " " + name;
}

So now I have two method signatures for the greeting() method. I could just provide it a name or if I want to I could also provide it the greeting. This is a simple example of how you can use method signatures.

Here have a look at the List interface javadoc. Scroll down to the methods, look at add there. First one will add an item, the second one will do it at the right time.

There's a couple in there with same names, different implementations!

Let me know if that clears things up, happy to dive deeper if you need it!