... 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 dunno. I came to Perl 4.x from C, and I remember reading about symbolic references in, I think, the first Randal Schwartz Camel book. I thought to myself "Gee, that ought to be good for something..."     And an evil ember kindled in my heart.