It is indeed ugly. Having switched full-time to Kotlin a little less than a year ago, I honestly prefer their approach to String interpolation using `${var}`.

I understand Java has a backwards compatibility issue that Kotlin does not though, which would make breaking changes to all the hard-coded strings containing `$` that would now need to be escaped. This is discussed in the JEP.

Backwards compatibility - simultaneously Java's strongest and weakest asset.