printf and comments_number() order

I’m customizing the starkers theme which re-uses a lot of the twentyten functions. I’d like to display the post meta data using this modified twentyten_posted_on() function.

function twentyten_posted_on() {
	printf( __( '%2$s <span class="meta-sep">by</span> %3$s', 'twentyten' ),
			'meta-prep meta-prep-author',
			sprintf( '<span class="entry-date">%3$s</span>',
				get_permalink(),
				esc_attr( get_the_time() ),
				get_the_date()
			),
			sprintf( '<span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="%1$s" title="%2$s">%3$s</a></span>',
				( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ),
				sprintf( esc_attr__( 'View all posts by %s', 'twentyten' ), get_the_author() ),
				get_the_author()
			),
			sprintf( '<span>%1$s</span>',
				comments_number('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments')
			)
	);
}
endif;

For some reason it’s outputs “No CommentsOctober 6, 2010 by bzmillerboy” instead of “October 6, 2010 by bzmillerboy No Comments”.

I finally had to pull the comments_numbers out of the functions.php and put it after the function on the single.php, like this.

<?php twentyten_posted_on(); ?> <?php comments_number('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments') ?>

Any suggestions on how to get this to work within the function?