Haskell is part of the open source ecosystem and is
here to stay. We use pandoc, the swiss army knive of document
conversion, which created in 2006 by John MacFarlane, to dive
into the effects of using Haskell in an open source
project. Pandoc enjoys widespread use among technical and
less-technical users and is one of the best known open source
Haskell programs with millions of downloads. Yet, even
programmers interested in functional programming are
frequently unaware of pandoc’s implementation language.
We use pandoc as an example to answer many real-life questions
which surround Haskell: How did the choice of programming
language effect the development of the project? Do developers
get scared away by a language with a reputation of being
difficult to learn? Is anyone but computer scientists and
mathematicians able to contribute in a meaningful way? The
answers will help decision makers to know the pros and cons of
using Haskell for their applications.