Actually, I would say that making symbols and string distinct is one of the worst parts of the Ruby language, along with it weird use of ascii codes for characters.

Of course, this is a feature that provides some people with some speed-ups and some pseudo-safety. But it basically goes against the advantage of modern scripting languages - the ability to program in the large, to use "integer" rather the umteen varieties of bit chunks provided by c and such.

The article explains symbols fine but I want to get to the next, better scripting language where such things are discarded.