I agree we don't need to optimize for characters typed, and needing to memorize/lookup formatting directives is a time sink. What I _do_ want to see optimized

I agree we don't need to optimize for characters typed, and needing to memorize/lookup formatting directives is a time sink. What I _do_ want to see optimized for is readability - and this often is related to more compact representations. This is not hard-and-fast, and there's tradeoffs in both directions. This tradeoff becomes more tricky as you need to express finer grained control over formatting. Consider %{year}-%{month}-%{date} %{year-4-digit}-%{month-2-digit}-%{date-2-digit} %YYYY-%MM-%DD Or, outside the context of dates, Computed %u records in %u seconds (%0.3f MB/s) Computed %{unsigned int} records in %{unsigned int} seconds (%{float-precision-3} MB/s) Computed %{correctlyProcessedRecordsCount} in %{totalProcessingTime as seconds} (%{processingRate as megabytes-per-second with 3 digits precision} MB/s) I don't have a great solution here, I just want to point out that the verbose cases can also get ungainly. I think, if we try to optimize for "format strings read approximately like the text they output", that probably gets close to the best middle ground.