>Now all people do is complain

Amen, brother! For a language that has been so supremely successful in the "real world", i simply don't understand the HN crowd's disdain for it.

As an aside, "printf format strings" are actually a DSL and hence the complexity. In their book, The Practice of Programming Kernighan & Pike actually show how to implement something similar for Network Packet encoding/decoding. It is quite neat and validates the power of this approach.