An Old News Post, and 20 Years of Pandoc

4 August 2026

I recently noticed that over the last day or so I’d got increased traffic to this rarely-visited website. Quite a few folks were reaching the home page, and a surprising number were landing on an old post of mine from 2004 about Haskell. Why on earth did that happen?

Well, on August 2, John MacFarlane posted a 20 year retrospective on his much-used document conversion toolkit, pandoc. In telling the tale, John mentioned that he got turned on to Haskell back in 2004/5 because that old post of mine.

Given the reach of John’s beautiful and useful toolkit, this may well—no joke—be the widest impact I’ve had on the profession or the wider world.

Anyway, thanks for the shout-out, John, and for all your hard work with the rest of the pandoc team on crafting a truly useful tool.

Of course, I also think that John’s side gig in philosophical logic is great.