Symbols are used all the time in Ruby/Rails when sending methods.
For example, look at the following method call:
instance.do_stuff(:foo => :bar, :answer => 3)
What you are actually sending to the do_stuff method is a hash that looks
like the following:
{ :foo => :bar, :answer => 3 }
For these purposes, they are basically human-readable identifiers. The
advantage they have over strings in this case is that they are re-used, so
if you use :foo in your application 100 times, it's only in memory once.
Whereas if you use "foo" 100 times, it's in memory 100 times.
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