Guido, can you please elaborate?

"What's going on" is usually that the same arguments are going to be passed over and over again, and the programmer wanted to avoid this repetition. The other option is adjusting the function to a predefined interface.

The alternative to partial is writing a closure in the form of a function, that needs to be carefully inspected to verify that it is indeed just a partial application and not something more complex. It has more opportunity for introducing an error. And it's longer and adds distance between related parts of the code.

Elazar