I stumbled over Bart de Goede’s article on building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python, and was reminded of my quest to show how useful Haskell is for solving real-world problems. Python is an eminently practical language, so nobody is surprised this can be done in Python. But Haskell? The Python code spends a lot of time updating mutable dictionaries. Surely we cannot easily port this code over to Haskell.

Let’s find out.