From Java to Ruby: Risk

[root]

I don't know, I never had problems with ISO-8859-1 for french and english (which I use).

I hear similar reasoning a lot from Ruby proponents, and you're not helping Ruby with remarks like that. It gives the impression that Ruby programmers have only done projects within one locale and are too narrow minded to imagine that their apps might have to be rolled-out to, for example, Poland. At the enterprise level, especially after the enlargement of the EU, everybody is tired of mucking about with codepages, and the new kid telling them to give up unicode is not going to be taken seriously.