Agreed in theory, but I've seen plenty of hand-rolled solutions even so and I think the dbs are at least slightly more likely to get standardization via ORM devs. One of the most painful I've run across was a system that was allocating ips for short, but highly variable lifespan VMs and trying to store them in MySQL database manipulated with both Ruby and Python. Even with language support there was no real defense against coworkers trying to brute-force complicated network checks on assignments when sub-second responses were needed. Unless your work is only ever in a small corner of a large system a single language and standard library having a native type won't always protect you from your code getting handed ip addresses from a foreign source in various text formats. The original post explains why this is a potential nightmare in detail.