[O] Elisp programming style

[Thorsten]

Hi List, 
doing some Elisp programming (in an orgmode context) recently, the
following question with regards to the 'accepted programming style' for
Elisp concerned me:

How independent and self-sustained should helper functions be? 

I found some redundancy in elisp code, e.g. several (main and helper)
functions that do exactly the same thing to extract the same specific
args out of an argument list. My first reaction was, to factor out this
extraction into the main function, and then call the helper functions
from inside a (let ...) environment where the extracted args are stored
in a local variable.

But then I recognised, that the helper functions cannot be called
independently anymore, but only make sense when called from this one
main function with its local bindings.

Is there a kind of convention in a case like this? Like: "Make every function,
even a helper function, independent, and don't care about redundancy"?
Just being curious

cheers
-- 
Thorsten