It is a purely subjective design decision, but I personally prefer the stricter rules that don’t do backwards type inferences like this… type hints shouldn’t follow duck typing semantics. Otherwise you’re not providing nearly as much value IMO. Typescript is really the model organism here. They took the most cursed mainstream programming language, and made it downright good.

Today, the “: list[str]” is 11 wasted characters and it’s not as aesthetically pleasing. Tomorrow, you do some refactor and your inferred list[str] becomes a list[int] without you realizing it… I’m sure that sounds silly in this toy example, but just imagine it’s a much more complex piece of code. The fact of the matter is, you declared foo as a list[any] and you’re passing it to a function that takes an iterable[str] — it ought to complain at you! Type hints are optional in Python, and you can tell linters to suppress warnings in a scope with a comment too.

That being said, perhaps these more permissive rules might be useful in a legacy codebase where no type annotations exist yet.

Really, it’d be extra nice if they made this behavior configurable, but I’m probably asking for too much there. What’s next, a transpiler? Dogs and cats living together?!