What's the difference between ln -s and alias?

Question

I just found a workaround for a problem I was having with the subl command for Sublime Text 3 when the MacPorts version of python is installed. The instructions

Answer 1

ln -s creates a symbolic link, which is almost a file on your filesystem

alias is a shell specific thing

So, basically, a symbolic link is a better solution because it is going to work for everything. Like, if you want to make your file manager open text files with that specific program, you can point it to your symbolic link and it is going to work.