Indeed, I was waiting for the punchline where he reveals a superior alternative (given the fundamental nature of his criticism it needed to be a fundamentally s

Indeed, I was waiting for the punchline where he reveals a superior alternative (given the fundamental nature of his criticism it needed to be a fundamentally superior concept, to justify the rhetoric, so something that would give you an a-ha moment, rather than iterative improvements). When you open sourced protobuf (thank you for doing so), we at my existing company had implemented a functionally similar but not language agnostic implementation (as I believe many companies had), and it was very exciting to have a cross language implementation. Also to your last point one of the major drivers was the forward-backward compatability and message preservation across intermediate systems that only required knowledge of their portion of the message, so the author's assertion that this never comes up also surprised me. Of course I am all ears for the next revolution in high performance message formats that support schema evolution, etc., but the author did not provide one, and I think if one is going to unleash that level of negative rhetoric, one takes on the responsibility to also unveil at least a glimpse at an alternative.