The author has some reasonable points. There is old cruft in the standard library, and there are vital 3rd party libraries that will never go into the standard

The author has some reasonable points. There is old cruft in the standard library, and there are vital 3rd party libraries that will never go into the standard library. I don't think the path example is particularly strong, but things like NumPy, IPython, pytz and requests are essential for some tasks. The following is rather poor advice, though: "Python programmers should never restrict themselves to the standard library and should be open—even eager—to depend on third party packages that provide the APIs and functionality they need." Really, you should not be "eager" to depend on things outside the standard library unless you have a good reason to. Every 3rd-party dependency you use adds complexity and you will have to make sure that the latest version doesn't change out from under you. If you are building an open source tool, for example, you may end up supporting multiple versions of the packages you depend on. Sure, use a 3rd-party library if it is worth that overhead, but you should never do it without good reason.