> I'm not saying it's impossible to write a bad printf line and never test it, only to have it fail years later in production. It's absolutely possible and it has happened to me. Lessons learned.
A modern compile time type checked formatter would have prevented this mistake, you are deliberately choosing to use poor tools and calling this "pragmatism" because it sounds better than admitting you're bad at this and you don't even want to improve.
In fact C++ even shipped a pair of functions here. There's a compile time type checked formatter std::format, which almost everybody should use almost always (and which is what std::println calls), and there's also a runtime type checked formatter std::vformat, for those few cases where you absolutely can't know the format string until the last moment. That is a hell of a thing, if you need one of those I have to admit nobody else has one today with equal ergonomics.
A modern compile time type checked formatter would have prevented this mistake, you are deliberately choosing to use poor tools and calling this "pragmatism" because it sounds better than admitting you're bad at this and you don't even want to improve.
In fact C++ even shipped a pair of functions here. There's a compile time type checked formatter std::format, which almost everybody should use almost always (and which is what std::println calls), and there's also a runtime type checked formatter std::vformat, for those few cases where you absolutely can't know the format string until the last moment. That is a hell of a thing, if you need one of those I have to admit nobody else has one today with equal ergonomics.