> do you think of addition when you see `string + "concatenate"`

Yes. And it tortures me every time.

I religiously avoid string concatenation in Python for this very reason. It's not that "+" necessarily means addition; it's that it always means a commutative operation (to somebody who has learned some algebra). String concatenation is notoriously non-commutative, thus it is extremely disturbing to write it using a visibly commutative operator. Any other operator except "+" would be better. For example, a space, or a product, or a hyphen. Whatever. But please, not a commutative operator. It breaks my brain parser.