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Search Index in 150 Lines of Haskell (entropicthoughts.com)

submitted 1 month ago by Noughtmare to c/haskell

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Since we are talking about aggregating documents into an index, the word semigroup might pop into our heads."

This is why Haskell tutorials have a bad rep. Why not use a common English term like "monoid" instead?

Snark aside, the <> approach to solving the problem piecewise and aggregating the results into a larger instance of the same type is a really convenient approach.

[–] Noughtmare 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Not only is it convenient, it also enables parallelism:

"How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. (Strange Loop 2010)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Yes! Steele's Fortress-era talks are amazing. Really thought-provoking.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yes! Steele's Fortress-era talks are amazing. Really thought-provoking.