I've solved this problem the same way probably 5 times in rails apps You've just answered your own question :) There is a trade-off, like always. You've solve

I've solved this problem the same way probably 5 times in rails apps You've just answered your own question :) There is a trade-off, like always. You've solved this problem 5 times, sure – but maybe each of those 5 times you've dome something slightly different. Or maybe you fix a bug with an edge case, and that bug fix doesn't get incorporated into other projects. There are downsides. On the other hand, a dependency removes some simple code from your control. I don't think anybody in the Ruby community wishes to end up with the silliness of e.g. `isNAN` from Node.