Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ruby 1.9—Right for You? Dave Thomas on the just-released Ruby 1.9. It’s a development release that breaks backwards compatibility in a few minor ways, but new features include the YARV virtual machine (hence significant speed improvements) and unicode support via associating encodings with bytestrings. 26th December 2007, 12:09 pm

String types in Python 3. bytes are now immutable (just like the bytestrings they are replacing) and a new mutable buffer type has been introduced. 9th October 2007, 2:08 am