A few points regarding compatibility, reproducibility and encodings:
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We take not making breaking changes in 1.x releases of Julia very seriously. We test every registered package in the entire open source ecosystem with every release to make sure we haven’t accidentally broken anything.
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We keep binaries for every Julia release. As noted, they’re easy to install and use alongside each other. This is notably not the case for most C, C++ or Fortran compilers, which like to assume they own the entire system — if you want to use more than one version of gfortran at the same time, you’re going to need containers. The upshot is that if you need an old Julia version for whatever reason, you can easily install and use an old version just for one specific project.
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While Julia 2.0 will by definition be somewhat breaking (or it would just be 1.x for some value of x), it seems like FUD to suppose that a release that hasn’t yet been made will change everything and break everyone’s code. Especially given that we’ve said the opposite many times: the way Julia code looks and feels is done. I’ll say it again: we are not interesting in making gratuitous annoying changes in Julia 2.0. I wrote more about the kinds of changes that are of interest here. In short, the vast majority of Julia 1 code will keep working in Julia 2.
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The way Julia’s package manager works, when you have a Julia project, it gets its own project environment and the manifest file records the exact Julia version (as of Julia 1.7) and the exact version — down to the last bit — of every package dependency (since Julia 1.0) and every binary dependency (since Julia 1.3). You don’t need containers for perfect reproducibility. On the other hand, you cannot achieve this level or reproducibility in C or Fortran without containers — if you code depends on any libraries at all, you are at the mercy of whatever versions of those libraries happen to be installed on your system, and while Fortran the language is very careful about breaking changes, many libraries are not. As a result, you may not be able to compile your project at all, let alone get it to work as it once did. This is not a problem in Julia thanks to manifest files and immutable, content-addressed packages and binary artifacts.
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Since Julia 1.5, packages and binaries are downloaded from package servers at pkg.julialang.org which are maintained by the Julia project and which are backed by a replicated system of storage servers that preserve copies of every package and artifact version that anyone ever installs through the package servers (both registered and unregistered versions of registered packages). That means that if you have a manifest that you instantiated via Julia’s package servers once, you will be able to install it forever. This is completely decoupled from GitHub and will continue to work even if GitHub disappears.
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ASCII is certainly a venerable standard, but at this point Unicode is no less respectable and is certainly standardized. We’re not just making this stuff up. Julia source is UTF-8, which is a brilliantly designed and carefully specified superset of the ASCII encoding and rapidly becoming the encoding that is used everywhere for everything.