We (the institution of programmers broadly speaking) tried that, and it was a hot mess. It's fine for scratch for a single machine, running a single version of

We (the institution of programmers broadly speaking) tried that, and it was a hot mess. It's fine for scratch for a single machine, running a single version of the software. As soon as you involve multiple computers talking or multiple software versions over time, it quickly causes tons of issues. There's a reason most serialization formats are either self-describing, have external schemas (json), or offload state to a specific state store engine.