Reading the lastest update on JRuby’s push toward 1.0 and their strategy to handle strings between Ruby and Java something struck me as funny. Ruby, a language originally from Japan, doesn’t handle Unicode well. Usually it us Americans who think everyone should speak (American) English and therefore ASCII is just fine (who cares about Euro markers anyway?). Maybe Java should be thankful that its father, James Gosling, is Canadian, who generally tend to be more multilingual.
Although it is to Ruby’s credit that the libraries can be so easily augmented, so the Rails crew can plug the UTF holes.