Handling Unicode in your program and encoding data properly for communication with the world outside is for many programmers a new area. Thinking about the way your strings are encoded when stored in a disk file or sent over the internet has previously been a no-brainer as all characters fit in one byte. A text file was a text file and a string could be encoded in a binary without hesitation. Now days you have to think about character representation, ways of telling other programs how characters are represented, peculiarities of other languages than your own, terminal capabilities, file system name encoding and so on. The Unicode support in Erlang/OTP has been built up during the last three major releases to what it is today. While still not complete, it now covers a lot of areas where third party libraries was previously required.