> I use it myself all the time, but it just shows the weakness of the tooling that people have to resort to such measures. It's not resorting to anything. It's

> I use it myself all the time, but it just shows the weakness of the tooling that people have to resort to such measures. It's not resorting to anything. It's a valid means of debugging. People use it even in languages like c and Java and in-browser JavaScript with very capable debuggers. It's quick, simple, and doesn't require intervention to record or examine anything. > Why not borrow from Common Lisp's format and make it return the string if file=None is passed? Because thatsa terrible idea because it's non-intuitive, verbose, and potentially confusing. Debug format strings are common in other languages, such as rust, so this isn't some half-thoughtout, python-only idea.