And string templates looked exciting to me. But after skimming https://openjdk.org/jeps/430
it sounds like they want to avoid backticks for "safety"? Like we can already use the plus operator to append strings why would it be any less safe to give us an ergonomic way to do that? Oh well, Java isn't exactly known for being ergonomic.
Using STR."" instead of STR.`` is just an aesthetic choice, and one that I think makes sense for Java.
Overloading that behavior by default would likely blow up a lot of code and certainly violate the principle of least surprise.
No one else has such an oddity
And I fail to see how it's much of an oddity, as other RDBs use all kinds of BS for literals. SQL Server for example uses [square brackets].
If anything backticks have some history of being used for string literals in some languages (e.g. Javascript and Go), whereas in many others they are used for command substitution (which is not far removed from what a string literal combined with a processor does in Java).
Different for the purpose of being different.