That is ceratainly one of my standard examples.

The best answer to this seems to be simply:

    var sum = ls => ls.reduce(add, 0)

ISTM that this is neither as elegant nor as easy to reason about, but it's also not horrible. It really moves away from the easy association that Ramda makes between

    var currentTotal = reduce(add, 0, nbrs);

and

    var sum = reduce(add, 0); //=> :: [Number] -> Number

Of course this arrow syntax is ES6 (or transpiler) only, but the library is predicated on that notion. Ramda is a bit of an oddity, still maintaining compatibility with ES3 - ES6.