Wherever a book on writing software describes the 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch on Software Engineering, consider whether the clarity of the argument can be improved by adding the following parenthetical clause:
[…], a straw man version of an otherwise real conference that took place in 1968, […]
Usually it can. The proceedings of the conference, which were written post facto by the editors and typists locking themselves in a hotel room with tapes of the sessions and typewriters in various states of repair, are available at Brian Randell’s website along with reflections on their creation. Does the report actually contain the fact presented in whichever book you’re reading now?
Probably not. The article “Crisis, What Crisis?” Reconsidering the Software Crisis of the 1960s and the Origins of Software Engineering investigates the position of the 1968 report in the rhetoric of the software industry and reliance by secondary authors on its content. The conclusion is that the report was largely ignored for about a decade, when it suddenly became the thing that kickstarted the software crisis and software engineering.
It would only be a little satirical to say “the software crisis was invented circa 1980 by Edsger Dijkstra, who postulated its origins in the NATO conference of 1968, a straw man conference” etc.
