I think I asked Ondrej at some point what his thoughts where on type hinting in LNST, and my recollection was it was something he wanted to move gradually to so I decided to put those there, since in the case of those functions the type is very important. 

From my understanding, as we move from XML recipes to python ones, we probably want to be a little more strict about the typing of parameters. 

I think it makes it cleaner just from an inline code documentation perspective, especially in this case where the parameters were previously of an ambiguous type, and now they are more concrete. 

Related to the static analysis it sure makes IDE code completion ( and similar things)  a lot more concise.