I was wondering why the author mentioned _.partial after a sections about Function.prototype.bind. Wouldn't : _.partial(_.merge, {}).apply(this, confs); Be the same as: _.merge.bind(_, {}).apply(_, confs);

That being said, I'm glad this forced me to look up _.partial - seems like you can pass '_' as a parameter and that position in the arguments will not be bound in the partial function!