utils vs helpers

In his blog post about his preferred file structure for React projects, Josh W Comeau distinguished between utility and helper functions.

This is a question that I’ve wrestled with a lot myself, and so I appreciated the clear(ish) dilineation.

A helper is something specific to a given project. It wouldn’t generally make sense to share helpers between projects; the category.helpers.js functions really only make sense for this blog.

A utility is a generic function that accomplishes an abstract task. Pretty much every function in the lodash library is a utility, according to my definition.

Going forward, I’ll work on adopting this distinction in my own projects.