>  "Lots of http transport stuff" is still "web programming" (for me, at least).

Web programming to me sounds like javascript and css. A the very least something to do with html output at some point. Oh well.

  > Pinterest disagrees: http://engineering.pinterest.com/posts/2012/memcache-games/

I didn't see any reference in that post to them trying compression. It would have been an interesting comparison.

Good data point on usefulness though. Thanks for that.