March 13, 2026
Even history has bugs
Dijkstra's Crisis: The End of Algol and Beginning of Software Engineering (2010) [pdf]
Historians say software’s origin story is fake – programmers lose their minds
TLDR: A historian argues the famous story that modern software engineering was born at a 1968 NATO meeting during a “software crisis” is mostly a simplified myth. The community fires back with jokes, suspicion, and nostalgia, fighting over whether their entire professional origin story just got patched or deleted.
The latest nerd drama comes from a dry-looking history paper that turned into a full-on identity crisis for programmers. Historian Thomas Haigh basically strolls in and says: that famous tale you’ve heard a million times — that “software engineering” was born at a 1968 NATO meeting in Germany during a big “software crisis” — is mostly a myth built on copy‑pasted history. One commenter, Rochus, dropped the PDF like leaked celebrity DMs, and the thread instantly turned into Who Killed The Real History of Coding?.
Old‑school devs are outraged and delighted in equal measure. Some are cheering Haigh for calling out “lazy textbook lore” and saying historians just repeated the same feel‑good story about heroic engineers saving the world from chaos. Others defend the classic tale, arguing that even if the details are fuzzy, that era felt like a crisis and gave programmers a professional backbone. The spiciest comments accuse earlier historians of doing “fanfiction with footnotes,” while another user jokes that calling it a “crisis” was just a fancy way for managers to blame programmers for their own bad decisions. Memes fly about “long‑haired programming priests” becoming “respectable engineers,” and one commenter sums it up: “Apparently even our origin story has bugs.”
Key Points
- •The 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference identified widespread software project problems and endorsed “software engineering” as a remedy.
- •A 1969 follow-up conference in Rome failed to agree on specific core techniques for the new discipline.
- •Haigh argues the prevailing account of these events misinterprets the conference’s significance, participants, and relation to the “software crisis.”
- •The narrative gained traction through Michael S. Mahoney’s 1988 paper and subsequent works, including a 2002 chapter and multiple dissertations.
- •Campbell-Kelly and Aspray’s 1996 history and popular works like Dreaming in Code further entrenched and popularized the crisis/conference narrative.