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Every text I’ve read about Ruby symbols talks about the efficiency of symbols over strings. But, this isn’t the 1970s. My computer can handle a little bit of extra garbage collection. Am I wrong? I have the latest and greatest Pentium dual core processor and 4 gigs of RAM. I think that should be enough to handle some Strings.
Your computer may well be able to handle ‘a little bit of extra garbage collection’, but what about when that ‘little bit’ takes place in an inner loop that runs millions of times? What about when it’s running on an embedded system with limited memory?
There are a lot of places you can get away with using strings willy-nilly, but in some you can’t. It all depends on the context.