Why are trailing commas allowed in a list?

It helps to eliminate a certain kind of bug. It's sometimes clearer to write lists on multiple lines. But in, later maintenace you may want to rearrange the items.

l1 = [
        1,
        2,
        3,
        4,
        5
]

# Now you want to rearrange

l1 = [
        1,
        2,
        3,
        5
        4,
]

# Now you have an error

But if you allow trailing commas, and use them, you can easily rearrange the lines without introducing an error.

A tuple is different because ('a') is expanded using implicit continuation and ()s as a precendence operator, whereas ('a',) refers to a length 1 tuple.

Your original example would have been tuple('a')

It's a common syntactical convention to allow trailing commas in an array, languages like C and Java allow it, and Python seems to have adopted this convention for its list data structure. It's particularly useful when generating code for populating a list: just generate a sequence of elements and commas, no need to consider the last one as a special case that shouldn't have a comma at the end.

The main advantages are that it makes multi-line lists easier to edit and that it reduces clutter in diffs.

Changing:

s = ['manny',
     'mo',
     'jack',
]

to:

s = ['manny',
     'mo',
     'jack',
     'roger',
]

involves only a one-line change in the diff:

  s = ['manny',
       'mo',
       'jack',
+      'roger',
  ]

This beats the more confusing multi-line diff when the trailing comma was omitted:

  s = ['manny',
       'mo',
-      'jack'
+      'jack',
+      'roger'
  ]

The latter diff makes it harder to see that only one line was added and that the other line didn't change content.

It also reduces the risk of doing this:

s = ['manny',
     'mo',
     'jack'
     'roger'  # Added this line, but forgot to add a comma on the previous line
]

and triggering implicit string literal concatenation, producing s = ['manny', 'mo', 'jackroger'] instead of the intended result.