Wanting to initalize an array of fixed size is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in any programming language; it isn't like the programmer wants to put a break statement in a while(true) loop. Believe me, especially if the elements are just going to be overwritten and not merely added/subtracted, like is the case of many dynamic programming algorithms, you don't want to mess around with append statements and checking if the element hasn't been initialized yet on the fly (that's a lot of code gents).
object = [0 for x in range(1000)]
This will work for what the programmer is trying to achieve.