Like I said, I have trouble buying that as the reason, because a very similar Ruby release right around the same time did not cause the same problem. The major change in both cases was that strings now force you to consider encoding rather than just treating everything as a blob of probably-ascii-but-whatever-who-cares bytes. Writing code that was both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9-compatible wasn't easy, and there wasn't something like six to help you do it. The Ruby community generally responded by just supporting Ruby 1.9 going forward, and there was no major schism.