Dreaming in Code is the story of the first three years in the life of the ultimately doomed Chandler, a project that started as a larger-than-life rethink of how computers handle information and ended up as an open-source desktop calendar client at a time when mobile and web apps started taking over the world. In that it was quite similar to the story of Vertex which, admittedly, had a much better financial outcome for those involved.
Rosenberg managed to tick a lot of my personal interest boxes, from handling big projects through discussing the rise of David Allen’s Getting Things Done to talks of recursion and Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops. He ends the book with a reminder of the very first Long Bet made in 2002 between the man behind Chandler, Mitch Kapor, and the anti-humanist Raymond Kurzweil, that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029 which it apparently has last year, four before the deadline, though after reading Kapor’s rationale for betting against one realized he didn’t quite know what the test was actually about.
But I digress. Some of Chandler’s initial promise of universal notes and inherited properties lives on in Tinderbox and it is no coincidence that I first learned about the book from its creator Mark Bernstein. Truly shared calendars and being able to edit a meeting that someone else created is no longer a pipe dream but a table-stakes feature of every calendar service. No one thinks too hard about syncing because the Internet is everywhere and everything is on the cloud. I shudder to think how many person-hours the developers of Chandler spent thinking about these, and for nothing.
By coincidence I am typing this from Barcelona, a 15-minute walk from Basílica de la Sagrada Família which began construction in 1882 and is expected to be completed this very year. It had to survive Spanish Civil War and two World Wars, and at the end of it all it will be more of a tourist attraction than a place of worship, a European version of the Vegas Sphere. Such is the fate of grand ambitions.