As I ponder this more, I think it's useful to consider the concepts of simplicity and complecting as articulated by Rich Hickey in his talk "Simple Made Easy".

As I ponder this more, I think it's useful to consider the concepts of simplicity and complecting as articulated by Rich Hickey in his talk "Simple Made Easy". As he explains it, to complect is to braid multiple things together, whereas in a simple system, multiple things are composed. He has often pointed out that simplicity does not necessarily mean fewer things; as I understand it, it's not about how many things they are, but how they interact. In that light, the single flexible tweet list function presented in this post is indeed problematic because it has a few things braided together: a tweet list, a profanity filter, and pagination. So we should be suspicious of repetition, but at the same time avoid complecting.