Yep, I believe that it will continue being "rediscovered" until some well-executed, open-source embodiment of them becomes a de facto standard. My goal is to make Protocol Buffers just that.

Another way of putting it is that I'm trying to beat Greenspun's Tenth Rule by making that "half of Common Lisp" separable from Common Lisp so that C programs (and high-level programs too) don't have to keep re-inventing it. As a bonus, this will help make languages more interoperable too.