This is not 'akin to a decorator', it's is partial function! Do you name your functions: def THIS_IS_IN_GLOBAL_SCOPE(): ... Of course you don't! Then why

This is not 'akin to a decorator', it's is partial function! Do you name your functions: def THIS_IS_IN_GLOBAL_SCOPE(): ... Of course you don't! Then why would you consider forcing someone to write this: def bar(spam, eggs): print spam, eggs def foo(eggs): return bar('baz', eggs) Which even manages to lose information, hence why functools.partial exists in the first place. This is bad because readers now see FOO and think it's a constant: FOO = functools.partial(bar, 'baz')