This article would be more accurately written as &quot;prefer the standard library over 3rd party solutions&quot; since all the examples given still required dependencies, but ones that are shipped as part of the language runtime (Ruby in this case).<p>However when discussing languages with no specific standard library or languages who&#x27;s standard library is missing feature <i>y</i>, then it&#x27;s quite understandable to use a 3rd party battle tested dependency. In fact I&#x27;d go further and say it would be advisable to use a respected 3rd party library when dealing with code which handles security or other complex concepts with high failure rates.