Definitely agree to the change to his second example . Using something like Math . max instead of a custom ternary makes it much more obvious that you ' re looking for the largest number . I know I ' d personally never use the specific example you posted though , just because I ' d automatically jump to the method used in his third example anyway . And , as uTheIncredibleWalrus already mentioned , you can bypass the need for . apply by using the ES 6 spread operator . Perhaps the article author felt that it ' d make the example too similar to his third and final version , hence the use of the ternary ? If only . apply was doing only the one job of calling with given arguments , rather than also doubling as the this context setter which is already done by . bind . We could ' ve then done even better than the ES 6 spread operator , something like this const largestOfFour outerArr outerArr . mapMath . max . apply