From MJD’s file of good advice:

#11911 You wrote the same thing twice here. The cardinal rule of programming is that you never ever write the same thing twice.

It’s madness to build and maintain large systems with “snippet copy&paste” programming.

Think about it: Perl itself is a large helping of “helper functions” draped over C, no? I don’t think anyone would argue that you should use C, lest you forget how to manage memory manually.

The question depends mostly on how well-designed your helper functions are. They need to be either simple or complex enough that you can either forgo them or use them, but never need to work around them. Finding the right granularity of separation of concerns is of the essence.

Makeshifts last the longest.