Like dynamic typing and other things, declaring things in the middle of your code block seemed like a great idea to young me, but as I’ve gotten older, things like organizing variable definitions, strict use of types (or the kind of sucky type hints in Python), and other kinds of self-documenting declarations have become much more appealing to me. It might save “real work” from happening if you measure by lines of code, but you pay that price later when debugging or reading code you haven’t touched in a long time.