[tshaddox]

IMO it's a pretty reasonable claim about experience level, not intelligence, and isn't at all an ad hominem attack because it's referring directly to the fundamental design choices of protocol buffers and thus is not at all a fallacy of irrelevance.

[compiler-guy]

Whatever else Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are, and whatever mistakes they made in designing protobufs, they are not amateurs.

Not long after they designed and implemented protobuffers, they shared the ACM prize in computing, as well as many other similar honors. And the honors keep stacking up.

None of this means that protobufs are perfect (or even good), but it does mean they weren't amateurs when they did it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Ghemawat