I do it entirely, exclusively, only, purely because it requires less punctuation typing. It returns a list anyway. The performance hit is virtually unnoticeable in almost every use case (unless this is a function taking in input strings formatted this way many times per second, but in that case you've got way worse to worry about first...).

As DaFranker points out, it's just easier to type than

    ('Hearts', 'Diamonds', 'Spades', 'Clubs')

and has less opportunity for typos and syntax errors. If I was concerned about performance I would replace it with a tuple, but it was Good Enough for a quick example.

I agree; what I usually do is type the string.split() version in a REPL (I keep one open permanently) and then copy-paste the result to the file.

It avoids having to do a big change if you need to add a new item with spaces in it.

It makes sense when all the values in the list are text.

Avoids lots of ", "

It's like old Perl idiom where Python's 'ab cd ef'.split(), would be written as qw(ab cd ef), which probably looks nicer --'qw' stands for 'quote words', I think.

also in the std library, https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collectio... field_names can take a single space separated string

I love this idiom. I also use it in Javascript.