8 hours ago
- Pandoc was created by John MacFarlane in 2006 as a Haskell program for document conversion, initially supporting Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX.
- The project grew over 20 years to support over 50 input formats and 76 output formats, becoming the most popular Haskell program and integrated into tools like Quarto and Jupyter.
- Pandoc's architecture uses a universal abstract syntax tree (AST) with readers and writers, enabling N×M conversions and extensibility.
- Haskell's algebraic data types, strong type system, and purity were crucial for managing the project's complexity and ensuring reliability.