How Things Got So Bad

We made our own mess.
Software development as a discipline hasn't been around very long. And it came
about almost by accident. In the beginning, it wasn't even seen as a discipline,
because there weren't enough people doing it. Then it exploded.
Practitioners cast about looking for some guiding principles to increase
professionalism, to improve the quality of the software they were making, and to
make life easier. Along the way, both practitioners and theorists with good
intentions made some very bad assumptions. These assumptions led to faulty
conclusions and bad practice. That made the mess.