workspace snapshot like R's save.image() 
there are a couple of questions on this on Stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35465534/how-do-i-save-the-entire-workspace-in-pandas-like-rdata
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12504951/save-session-in-ipython-like-in-matlab

Even the individual dataframe saving is a bit confusing - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17098654/how-to-store-data-frame-using-pandas-python

From IRC, the following comments were made 
- You can use hdf5, but in this case, always roundtrip it before using it, even when it was just computed -- unfortunately, the to_hdf/read_hdf won't necessarily give you the dataframe you started with
- pickle is undebuggable, non-version-compatible, Python-only, insecure-to-unserliazed, and potentially-incorrect-given-the-right-data

The recent news that Pandas is collaborating with Apache Arrow is encouraging - but what is going to be the long term official way for persisting the workspace ?

A lot of workflows come from R, where the entire workspace is snapshotted (and backed up to s3,etc) . This is perfectly production ready in R - but in Pandas a lot of creative invention is needed to make this work (for example - http://cyrille.rossant.net/moving-away-hdf5/). 
