>In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error, Python happily went along with it, and iterated over each character in the string individually.

I've been using python for about 13 years professionally and I wrote up a list of "things I wish python would fix but I think probably never will" and treating strings as iterable lists of characters was on there.

I've seen this bug multiple times and the fix is relatively easy - just to make strings by default non-iterable and use "string.chars" (or something) if you really want to iterate through the chars.

Nonetheless, I still love the language and wouldn't use anything else.

>Instead of just throwing an error, Python happily went along with it, used an uninitialized value, and then all the logic broke.

This one gets caught by linters - unfortunately 90% of most python linters spit out rule violations which aren't important which drowns out stuff like this in the noise.