Twenty years of Pandoc

John MacFarlane has published a lengthyretrospective to commemorate twenty years of the Pandoc document converter.

On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to mywebsite, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consistedof about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside fromGHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText,HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. Ihad no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over twohundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project wouldbecome the mostpopular program written in Haskell; that I would spend countlesshours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I wouldcollaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandocwould come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allowautomatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it wouldbecome integrated into academic writing tools like Quarto and Jupyter Notebook; that it would beinstalled on millions of computers around the world.

How did this happen? I want to take advantage of pandoc's birthdayto tell the story of the project, as best I can remember it.