I feel both all and any are opportunities slightly wasted in Python, although I have some idea of why they couldn’t work any better.

It would be so useful if any((a, b, c, d, ...)) meant the same as a or b or c or d or ... but it doesn’t — quite. It actually returns bool(a or b or c or d or ...). Exactly the same is true for all and and.

So you need to write something like

next((i for i in (a, b, ...) if i), False)

to get the “first non-empty” part of any and something even worse for all.

Why is it like this? My guess is so that empty all(()) and any(()) have logical and consistent meanings with the non-empty versions. For example, you really want all(()) to be True but True is not in fact an element in ().