Spent almost half of the day figuring out Ruby concepts, or in the ears of Rubyists, the art of Rubyism. I just came to realisation that symbols in Ruby are merely “names” to be used as hash keys or simply cheap “strings”.

They are not strings and therefore lexical operations performed on them are disallowed. They are cheap because they take up lesser memory and no, they do not represent anything if used outside of hash context.

“Hey! What alien language are you speaking man!” (shrugs)

It is not an easy feat trying to figure out programming concepts especially when the idea of symbols don’t appear much in other languages such as Java.

For the uninitiated, Ruby in this case is a programming language. Not to be mistaken with the actual jewel or the sport Rugby. I had people asking me why I like that sport which left me confused for the other half of the day. “Huh? What sport?”

And no, I don’t dig contact sports.