Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the above.
In your first example, you change an attribute of an object. In your case you called it .value but could just as well have been called .jacket.
In the second case you replaced one immutable object with another. You didn’t change the “value” attribute of 1002 to 1001. You replaced the entire object, 1002 with a new one: 1001.
That’s a very complicated way to explain it though.
It’s like putting your friend Sarah on a bike and then giving her Christina’s jacket. You haven’t changed the fact that Sarah is on the bike and Christina isn’t.
The thing is, none of the suggested alternatives can do what pickle does, and the article focuses on a narrow (albeit ubiquitous) use case: serialisation of untrusted data.
There are still legitimate use cases for pickle, especially when storing, caching, or comparing objects that can’t easily be serialised with say, JSON or TOML. It’s a question of using the right thing for the right job is all, and pretending like JSON is a comparable alternative to pickle doesn’t help anyone.
Depending on how complicated you’re willing to allow it to be to run locally, you could just run a webserver right on the desktop. Bind it to localhost:8000 so there’s no risk of someone exploiting it via the network, anf then your startup script is just:
It’s not smooth, or professional-looking, but it’s easy ;-)
If you want something a little more slick, I would probably lean more toward “Path 2” as you call it. The webserver isn’t really necessary after all, since you’re not even using a network.
One option that you might not have considered however could be to rewrite the whole thing in JavaScript and port it to a static web page. Hosting costs on something like that approaches £0, but you have to write JavaScript :-(
For anyone interested, I recently switched from using ty to Pyrefly and so far I’m very happy with the results. Mypy is more comprehensive, but painfully slow. ty delightfully fast, but lacking Django support is a deal-breaker.
Pyrefly mostly supports Django (unless you get creative with custom querysets) and for me, the trade-off is worth it for the performance.