[laumars]

This article would be more accurately written as "prefer the standard library over 3rd party solutions" since all the examples given still required dependencies, but ones that are shipped as part of the language runtime (Ruby in this case).

However when discussing languages with no specific standard library or languages who's standard library is missing feature y, then it's quite understandable to use a 3rd party battle tested dependency. In fact I'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.

[50CNT]

Matter of fact, sometimes it's better to be using a respectable 3rd party library. Requests vs. urllib2 in Python springs to mind, and I'm sure there's more examples.