Consider enhancing default string templates to support $foo or $!{foo}

println "hello $user whats it like in $user.country.description today?"

could make things a little simpler. Only should work for $identifer separated by whitespace. Otherwise ${} is required.

Similarly its very common that if an expression is null, then folks don't want to output 'null'.

So how about

println "hey $!

"

which would not print

hey null

if the user is null, rather it'd print

hey