Part of that can also be that the helper functions are taking in whole objects (think js mvc style model objects) when they're really doing a date calculation o

Part of that can also be that the helper functions are taking in whole objects (think js mvc style model objects) when they're really doing a date calculation on one field in the objects. It's not bad that the logic is encapsulated, it's that its encapsulated at the wrong layer. I've run across well written 50 line functions in Perl or c# but I would hesitate to call a function in js or other potentially more concise languages well written (discounting lines devoted to object/dict/hash definitions).