Ah I see, I believe you've mixed up currying with partial function application, that's what confused me (but, again, I'm not an expert on functional languages s

Ah I see, I believe you've mixed up currying with partial function application, that's what confused me (but, again, I'm not an expert on functional languages so it could be me that's mixed up). I believe that currying doesn't take any arguments except the function itself: # Signature of f is (a, b, c) -> r g = curry(f) # Signature of g is a -> (b -> (c -> r)) # i.e. g is a -> blah, # where blah itself is a function taking b, etc. Admittedly you can get partial function application out of currying (but only with parameters at the start of the parameter list): g = curry(f) h = g(a)(b) # Signature of h is c -> r But, although they're related, they're different procedures overall: sometimes you'll really want the curried function without immediately applying some arguments to it. Anyway, replacing "currying" with "partial function application" in your earlier comment: I suppose you're right to some extent, but the "this" parameter usually isn't that hidden and in Python you even pass the "self" parameter explicitly. I suppose the real major thing is you've put a bunch of parameters into a single class/tuple/struct rather than spelling them out individually; if you had a weird language that didn't support structs etc. then some partial function application would certainly be a very useful alternative to writing the same argument list out many times. But once you've got the struct, making your utility functions be methods is just minor syntactic sugar on top of that.