In these formative stages of my experience with Ruby, one feature of the language that I keep feeling on uneven ground with are Symbols.

I had a feeling I should give them respect as much of the learning Ruby literature says to basically ignore them for now, or launch into lengthy defences of why they exist (usually forgetting to explain how they work).

In case you're unfamiliar with Ruby syntax, a Symbol looks like this

:a_symbol

With the numerous ways of defining variables in Ruby this is another variable looking constuct, except that it isn't actually a variable at all (you cannot assign to it).

So what is a Symbol, actually. To be honest I'm still struggling for a good simple definition. I think the best way to think of it, is as a constant (i.e. immutable) placeholder for the name of something. Or more practically put, a colon in front of the string you want to use for a hashkey. Agile Programming With Rails 4th Ed puts it simply 'a Symbol is a name for something'.

I wrote on Twitter that I felt Symbols were extra syntax put in to solve a problem a programmer in a high level interpreted language shouldn't have to worry about. Memory management. In Ruby everything is an object, and objects are much bigger than the primitives you have in Java, C or even PHP. A string for example in PHP (and as in C) is still ultimately a sequence of bytes stored in contiguous memory addresses. In Ruby, a string is always an object, and that requires a fair chunk of memory to represent. If you have a bunch of hash tables, using objects as a hashkey is inefficient and wasteful.

Symbols help solve this inefficiency. A Symbol is still an object, but a special one. It has few methods the main ones being to get its string value and another its integer value, it's immutable and there's only ever one copy of it. So it's much more efficient to use a symbol as a hashkey than a Ruby string. In Ruby (and most OO languges) two strings even if consisting of the same sequence of characters are different objects. In Ruby two symbols of the same sequence of characters are the same object. In large applications this feature can save a tremendous amout of memory.

The other key characteristic of Symbols is immutability. Symbols cannot be assigned to, they just are. In a language that lacks a true constant construct (uppercasing a variable name is the convention for defining a Ruby constant but read-only access isn't enforced at runtime, you can write to what Ruby calls a 'constant'), Symbols can be useful.

So are Symbols a good language feature? At this point with my lack of experience with Ruby I don't really feel qualified to answer that yet definitively. My gut though, says no. I feel in a high level language the need for extra syntax to optimise code adds an unnecessary burden on the programmer. They seem so out of place in a language that works so hard to strip away unneccessary syntax. Symbols, to me detract from Ruby's power to define elegant and natural sounding expressions.

The difficulty authors have in describing what Symbols are, how to use them and why they should be used seems like a language design smell to me. I dare say as I become more familiar and accustomed to the presence and use of Symbols I'll learn to accept them. But as a Developer new to Ruby, they seem out of place.

I haven't gone into an excessive amount of detail about the nature and application of Symbols. For that the two best resources I've found explaining are http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2005/08/19/understanding-ruby-symbols and http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/ruby/symbols.htm.