> I don't think it's an accident that so many successful languages have had trouble later with strings.
Of course. The obvious reason is that all of them are at least as old as Unicode itself.
Unicode awareness was not even looming on the horizon when they were first created. Citing their initial lack of Unicode awareness as support for any theory about language success is... well, it's a number of things, but "relevant" is not of them, and I'm honestly puzzled as to what would lead you to think otherwise.
