I'd like to talk about uses for serialized data this time, looking at them through contrasting language-neutral formats: YAML and protocol buffers. These will be the basis for discussing an interesting Python interpreter, specially built to make working with protocol buffers easier.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization) has a really great, straightforward definition of serialization: "the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored." YAML is a really easy format for serialization/deserialization for simple Python data types since it represents data structures in a way that's really similar to how Python does; in my experience, however, this is not so much the case for defined types.
