> In my 23 years of programming, I have never experienced this bug. I've also never heard of anyone else experiencing this. I've even said this in fora where I should have had someone pop up to correct me; a corollary to Cunningham's Law is that if you say something that should be controversial but nobody pops up to correct you, it must not be controversial after all.

This is such an odd claim. Mixing up a string for a list of strings, which both satisfy the iterable interface, happens all the time in python. Does the author, and his acclaimed fora simply not use python?