Symbols are yet another use case; "I want something as efficient as a small number" (probably 4 bytes nowadays) "but I want to type a nice human name for it, and I don't want to even have to think about the translation". It's neither "text" nor a "binary", it's actually a well-disguised int (or similar type).
I love symbols in Ruby. I wish every language had something similar, rather than having me define constants, importing the constants, etc. Just let me create symbols I can pass around easily.
Debatable. I haven't been doing Ruby for a few years, but when I did, it was mostly used as dictionary keys. So, sure, you didn't need to define your constant somewhere, but on the other hand, you end up a typo away from an invalid lookup. Getting a NameError is a much easier way to locate the origin of the problem.
