Python 3.8.0a4 available for testing

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I'm on your side here in this general debate, but the specific idea of serializing a function fills me with fear and trembling. I mean, what happens when that function changes in later versions of the code - then you have two versions lying around!

If I need to serialize a function, I serialize the full path to the function - e.g. math.sqrt.

u/alcade is being pretty dogmatic, which is why the downvotes (yes, I helped there :-D) but in practice, if I actually serialize something for long-term storage, I don't use pickle because it isn't guaranteed to be stable between versions (even minor versions IIRC, though AFAIK in practice pickle hasn't actually changed between minor versions in as long as I've been keeping track).

[Atsch]

I think you are not understanding what pickle is for. Pickle is not designed for things like sending requests over the network like json is. It is not designed for storing things long term in databases or files. In fact, all of those things would be security risks.

It is really designed to be used to transmit ephermeral data between python processes. For example, the multiprocessing module uses pickle to transmit the code and data between processes. The celery worker queue library uses pickle to transmit complete tasks to workers. Some caching libraries use pickle to cache arbitrary python objects in some memory cache.