He's trying to pick on Paul Vixie for such a irrelevant detail. The fact that he had to mention it to boost his ego makes the rest of his post not worth reading.
edit: I also enjoy the reaction of HN readers. It's fun. People take this site too seriously.
Absolutely; he's right. You should not mix data and code. That's the reason why my own site(s) are all static, and my website does not look like it's from 1993. (just kidding, it does intentionally, but my blog is Pelican)
You can still write a static site that talks to a database and can accept form input for users to login and do things. It's not impossible. There's no reason to require every page view to be dynamically generated. We invented countless types of caching software to make dynamic sites as static as possible! Why is it illogical to rip out the dynamic piece altogether and use a static site generator for (nearly) everything? Why does every page view have to hit a language interpreter or virtual machine? It doesn't!
It shouldn't!
Do people believe that websites can't use databases without being dynamic? That's the only explanation I have here.
edit: I have seen the other end of the spectrum -- a 10 million line PL/SQL CMS that dynamically generates the entire website -- HTML, JS, CSS -- from an Oracle database. Even the static content was in the database as blobs! Everything served through the Oracle Application Server (Apache with mod_plsql or mod_owa, which rarely got updates) and had no chance of scaling well. But people paid out the ass to license it!
My site is static too. I had... uh... a bad experience with Wordpress about 7 years ago.
I think most competent professionals know that you should use static sites when you can get away with them. Look how many static site generators there are:
(You can also go look and find all the tools that will render a static site from a hidden Wordpress install).
To me, Vixie's take here is not very interesting, nor is it very useful. If you're the type of person to learn something from an ACM post, and you have a dynamic site, chances are it's dynamic because it needs to be.
But then I'm a little biased towards reading this article as a "get off my lawn" piece, and that's not very fair either.
edit: I also enjoy the reaction of HN readers. It's fun. People take this site too seriously.