What's the point of showing an example if it's incorrect? If someone asks "how do I get some frigging text to show up on the terminal" and the answer is incorrect, it's bad advice as far as I'm concerned.

> and how likely is that to fail anyway (at least I never had the canonical C hello-world fail on me).

I don't expect to know how likely writing to stdout is to fail and I don't think any answer to that question other than 0 really warrants ignoring the potential error if the correct result of invoking your program depends on it. For what it's worth, at least in Unix-likes, stdout could be pretty much anything. Writing to stdout could fail because a switch at the user's ISP is rebooting.