I'm not sure if it's really less confusing. I once spent about an hour struggling with string.Replace in C# before I bothered to read the documentation. Falls i

I'm not sure if it's really less confusing. I once spent about an hour struggling with string.Replace in C# before I bothered to read the documentation. Falls into the 'gotcha' bucket in my mind. Now, I'm pretty sure that strings are interned in C#, so making them immutable makes a lot of sense from that perspective. It's just that the language encourages mutable state in so many other areas that it's a bit of a mental shift when you have to deal with strings. In Java... afaik strings aren't interned by default, so I can't really argue for immutability there. The original author's argument for method chaining feels like a separate case altogether. Really it's primarily used when building embedded DSLs in these languages. In that case, standard semantics be damned; do what you need to to make the code look how you want.