I can understand if you don't like the syntax of string interpolation, but that argument is a cop-out.

If you're genuinely confused by it's behaviour then I'd suggest steering clear of the Printf (and even the vanilla Print/Println functions which does concatenation and automatic type conversion).

Or perhaps, a better suggestion would be to read the language specs and learn interpolation's behaviour since this "magic" is almost always well documented [hint: it's actually less complicated than Printf ;)]