I'm not a fan either. Java seems to be declining in prevalence in my corner of industry, I'm sure these changes are made by wiser minds than mine, but I'm sceptical about whether such a choice is really right for users.
It seems just as difficult to remember/useless as lambda expressions that look fine as vanity one-line expressions and then get difficult to write for most programmers.
We don't really need vanity innovation in the Java world. I would have asked for priority on the FX replacement to Swing, or support for running on ESP32 IoT devices as replacement to the Arduino platform.
Instead we get some weird looking syntax for what is basically a non-problem.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which are entirely unrelated projects to this one with very different engineers working on it. Those are easily parallelized, if you will. I don’t see why having progress completely elsewhere by different people is detrimental to these goals at all.
I'll be fine and ignore it completely like I've done with lambdas. I just pity the fools who enter Java world to learn the language and will suffer trying to learn what they believe is something normal programmers use.
Poor souls.
You could always use the + operator to join strings. Even a external library would do just fine when you want to insert some kind of variable name inside strings for that purpose.
Don't really get the need for this to be a core function with such a java-unlike grammar.