[beambot]

I have no idea what you're talking about. Functional languages are irrelevant to this conversation.

For 99% of personal blogs and a large number of "mom-and-pop" business sites, you'd be lucky to find >1000 individual webpages on their site, each less than 100kB in size. MMAP to your heart's content... 100MB can easily be kept permanently in memory.

None of those "dynamic" elements you mentioned are difficult to do statically: You render once using a template language by iterating through and rendering each page in your sitemap. This handles most "dynamic" content you mentioned: tables, tags, tagclouds, pagination, related posts, etc. Using Jekyll or Hyde, you're talking ~100ms per post -- or 1.5 minutes to render 1000 pages. (In fact, Hyde used to use Django under the hood to do the rendering!)

I can definitively say, it's a big win for most personal websites -- most dynamic elements can be done at "compile time", others are covered by 3rd party services using client-side JS (eg. Disqus for comments), and if you need any others you should switch to a dynamic site. Tom Preston-Werner (github CEO) agrees with me; that's why he developed Jekyll for github [1]. Github pages are hardly a "manufactured" example, and they do work well in practice.

[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hac...