As a matter of fact, I wonder where newcomers come up with the tendency to gravitate toward symbolic references. They're not a part of the languages I grew up with such as Pascal and C. I don't know Java, but I don't get the impression that symbolic references are in common use in that language either.

Having done quite a bit of shell scripting at some point in the past, I was also once or twice tempted to use symbolic references in Perl, it seemed to me that constructing variable names might be practical in some cases. I quickly gave up the idea when I figured out that: 1. it can't be done with lexical variable; 2. it requires no strict refs; and 3. most knowledgeable people advise against it. I also found that, in the only specific case where I initially tried to use symbolic references, a hash of hashes would just do what I needed far better (and in a much clearer way).

Other than various breeds of shells, DCL (a command language more or less equivalent to the shell under VMS) also has similar constructs (but, granted, this is not exactly a modern language). And, if I remember correctly from my use of the language in the late 1990s, TCL also has these things.