In the beginning, Python had no type decorations. That suited the overall goal of making the language fast and easy to work with. Flexible object types ... a type at one point and then redefining ...

A Python dictionary is a fast, versatile way to store and retrieve data by way of a name or even a more complex object type, rather than ... want to have a key that points to multiple values ...

The second snippet shows how to decorate a function Python is strongly, dynamically typed. This is fine, but at times when objects get too complicated, it can be a good thing to check for types.