I've done some of that in my teaching - people get the string addition right away since that's how people write in JS and other languages they already know. I i

I've done some of that in my teaching - people get the string addition right away since that's how people write in JS and other languages they already know. I immediately show how string interpolation works (by showing how it automatically calls .to_s to handle type issues.) When I've tried to jump right into string interpolation, people don't quite get what's going on, which resulted in me having to backtrack and do addition anyway. But that's just my experience.