> Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language.

It really depends on what the language is used for. Web-facing applications are, in general, going to received unicode input, so for them it matters. But for an embedded programmer, for example, it might be utterly irrelevant.

Horses for courses, really. It just so happens that Lua has other properties that are very attractive to web apps too, which the presentation outlined.

-- and yes, still alive and commenting :P