Most people expect to be able to serialize things

Just to be clear, we are talking about object serialization, right? I would certainly say serialization of data structures is common, but I was talking about objects in specific. That's something I haven't really ever had the need for in Perl. I don't see a whole lot of people asking how to do it, either (either here or in #perl). Because of this, I assumed it wasn't very common. I'm not saying this assumption is correct, of course, just explaining how I arrived at it. I'll just have to suspend judgement for now, I guess.