Comments are harsh on what I took merely as a pedagogical example, but maybe it's because y'all have been burned so many times. I agree with you who advise to resist speculative programming. Don't write it till you need it, since all code incurs a burden of maintenance.

But I would like to address a tangent: extracting configuration from code. Let's take the article's example and change it a little. I'll decompose it, since it already has become a function, but often the first step is just a series of statements. (I will also port it to javascriptish pseudocode, since I don't know Julia.) So this might be your first draft:

  response = HTTP.get('https://www.example.com/');

  if (response.status !== 200) {
     email('someone@example.com', 'something is wrong');
  }

Instead of abstracting this into more general functions, I might simply move the literals to the top of the file:

  url = 'https://www.example.com/';
  ok  =  200;
  to  = 'someone@example.com';
  msg = 'something is wrong';


  response = HTTP.get(url);

  if (response.status !== ok) {
      email(to, msg);
  }

The only reason I know to do this is to maybe make changes easier. Even if you never need to generalize your code to other uses, you may need to update it for reasons outside your control. For example, someone leaves the company, and now you need to email someone-else@example.com. Or marketing changes the URL.

Is there a name for this kind of refactoring?