I think that is sort of the point people are trying to make. Pretty much every language messes this up badly. It would be nice to see something learned from those mistakes.

Seems like some languages are getting the point. While looking for a resource about Unicode support, I saw promising things as well as inauspicious. Seems like multibyte character support would be a good thing to catalog for programming languages (specs as well as implementations)

Ruby doesn't, but it's regarded as a mistake and (afaik) is fixed in 1.9.

That is especially ironic when you consider that its creator is Japanese. So let me get this right... a language designed by a non-native-English-speaking individual can gain massive popularity without Unicode support, but an American who has no interest in Unicode is supposed to do it anyways? How does that make sense?

Ruby has always had excellent support for Japanese, though.

bingo. the japanese don't like unicode.

Because of UniHan?

You can use Unicode in Ruby 1.8, it's just not very convenient.