I read his announcement and I completely disagree. Strings are pretty basic, and getting them right is part of the work of a language designer. They're more important than macros. Not getting strings right can cripple a language.
And to call not supporting unicode "offensive" is missing the point. Only supporting ascii makes the language less powerful. It means you can't use Arc for solving problems involving text manipulation in languages other than English. That's a big space. Only supporting UTF-8 would make more sense.
And for all the Java bashing nowadays, Java got Strings right, and Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby didn't.
Java unicode support has historical been a mess too. They assumed that 16 bits would always and forever be enough for any code point. This was only "fixed" in 2004 and the warts are still there.
I suppose the lesson to take away is that just about every single language has messed up characters sets. It can't then be a fatal mistake but certainly isn't one that makes any sense to repeat.
