They are only a wart, if the typesystem is not powerful enough (such as Rust's typesystem). With dependent types, this is a non issue. In fact, you can implemen

They are only a wart, if the typesystem is not powerful enough (such as Rust's typesystem). With dependent types, this is a non issue. In fact, you can implement something like typesafe "printf" as a regular user-defined function in a language like Idris and to some degree even Scala. See e.g.: https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/672efcd784528b7d0b7e17ad9c115292 https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/672efcd784528b7d0b7e17ad9c...