Or it can mean a lot harder to understand and use. With types you get all of the metadata that you might not even have if it was plain text. In addition, every application chooses it's own serialization format. In the end, the only programs that compose well are those that work on text, not structured data (i.e. grep, awk, sed, etc...)

> You can certainly print them, but there's no guarantee you'll get all its contents by default, and there's still the problem of how to create those objects from some other output, e.g. in a file.

That's what CliXML is for. Export-CliXml writes objects to a file. Import-CliXml reads them back.

I think they're assuming the default view output is being used for Export-CliXML, when really it's serializing the object passed to it.