[mc4ndr3]

They're like enums but without the risk of colliding across unrelated contexts. And because they're dynamically generated you can have runaway symbol generation that triggers a memory consumption problem.

Newbies try to use strings as enums, because they don't understand enums. Symbols provide tradeoffs compared with both.

This is what you get with a dynamic language where people try to overload functions with "I accept a scalar OR an array!!!"

[cestith]

From the caller's perspective there's little difference between a procedure with variadic arguments and multiple dispatch. There's a lot of difference from the implementor's perspective, though. In Perl 5 you'd see a lot of ref() and wantarray() while in Raku you'd see different signatures for procedures with the same name.