A comment by EthanHS inspired me to write this:
From the perspective of a "long time" end-user of Python annotations:
in many discussions at PyCon, I have heard that people do not like the current state of forward declarations... I think that not requiring the string syntax is needed... the argument could be made that (annotations) are different enough to merit a change (to the language)...
Awesome to see i'm not the only one. In our software engineering team we have been using annotations in a 100k line code base for over 2 years (not google scale but not toy either), as comments-on-steroids: they are readable by developers to guide them in how to use a function, and by computers to provide better code completion and refactoring which in turn increases developer productivity and decreases the incidence of regressions. We love them for that. But we have refused to use strings as annotations, they do not fit and do not flow as other