Java's the same regarding == and .equals( ) and when it's Java code written by devs who also work in other languages, it definitely still results in bugs, sometimes that go undiscovered for remarkably long times (particularly if == happens to return the right result in most cases). Meaning/needing to compare references for string (and similar) types is exceedingly uncommon, yet uses the more "natural" syntax for testing equality. FWIW I can't remember working with a codebase where unexpected behavior due to operator overloading was a serious problem.