Nothing I hate more than a useless "helper" function that wraps a built-in feature of the language and gets buried in a "common lib" package that you need to inspect when you want to understand what is going on, instead of just relying on your knowledge of the language. Do we really need a function to map a dictionary and a list of keys to the corresponding values?
I'm a huge hater of these and I think they almost always decrease readability of the code and slow down the development and review process.
I want to read and write the language I'm developing with, not the helper methods of some overeager developer who wanted to leave his mark on the codebase.
Oh my god I got a flashback to Groovy's missing method [0] which caused us so many issues, and made our codebase so unreadable.
When you discover it for the first time, you think, "huh, neat, why not use it". Before you know it, nobody can reason about your code and if you leave, nobody wants to maintain it (esp. if your test suite is not extensive).
