Yep. Pity about getting chars / string encoding wrong though. (Java chars are 16 bits).
But it’s not alone in that mistake. All the languages invented in that era made the same mistake. (C#, JavaScript, etc).
Java was just unlucky, it standardised it's strings at the wrong time (when Unicode was 16-bit code points):
Java was announced in May 1995, and the following comment from the Unicode history wiki page makes it clear what happened: "In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. ..."
Java strings are byte[]'s if their contents contain only Latin-1 values (the first 256 codepoints of Unicode). This shipped in Java 9.
JEP 254: Compact Strings
What's the right way?
UTF-8
When D was first implemented, circa 2000, it wasn't clear whether UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32 was going to be the winner. So D supported all three.
utf8, for essentially the reasons mentioned in this manifesto: https://utf8everywhere.org/
Yep. Notably supported by go, python3, rust and swift. And probably all new programming languages created from here on.