Mixing types in an array/list is not remotely stupid. How exactly would you suggest expressing the lack of a value in a series of numbers without None/null? There's your mixed types.
Don't let weird dogma get in the way of practicality.
That is merely a detail of how the typing module has decided to set up convenient aliases. Treated by the language (and likely compilers) as different types.
I mean, it depends on what you mean by “type”. A list of some Protocol type (what other languages call “interfaces”) is still a homogenous list even though the concrete types are heterogeneous. This is almost always what you want when you’re thinking of “a heterogeneous list”.
Yeah, that's a better way of putting it :) 90% of the time, I'm something like Sequence[T], but I'm sure I've used Sequence[Optional[T]] a couple of times. I mean, I could drive donuts in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot at 3a, I just don't, and the same for heterogenous lists.
I’ll second that. I’ve been doing python for a while and haven’t used the mixed type list. I’ve actively avoided doing something like that. The situation doesn’t come up often.
I just use an extension wrapper around boost::property_tree for my json (and xml) needs. Way faster than the built in json support and does automagic type conversion so I don’t have to worry about it.
Now, I’m not running at Web Scale™ but pure python was slow enough to be annoying.
