According to the article, that's not really a fair comparison. The first example would need functools and at least 3 more methods to get to the same functionality of the latter example, at which point I think the former is less readable.

That said, I'm not a big fan of wrapping classes, or this library's weirdly-but-concisely-named functions. I guess I'll have to give this a try the next time I'm writing Python to see if it's that much of a boost.