There is a difference between "right" and "much better" (the term I used). I was able to upgrade my code to use Ruby 1.9 trivially, and the result still worked fine on Ruby 1.8. The transition was downright painless for almost everyone involved. (Disclosure: I am the Jay Freeman mentioned in the thank you at the bottom of Yehuda's article on the Ruby 1.9 encoding changes and how they would and did affect Rails.)