Rudimentary Currying and Partial Application in Python (gist.github.com)

I agree, but this "rudimentary" version is easier to understand for someone new to functional programming. It trades generality for pedagogical clarity.

The one place where the functools.partial failed me was in partialing on class methods. functools.partial actually gives you a callable class, instead of the functional closure that this example gives you (though I don't really consider this to be that great of an example). When a class is instantiated, the method functions (unbound methods) are turned into bound methods, something a class can't be. Guido talks about this a bit whole process here... http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-class-every...