I find it hard to believe in the way Dijkstra seems to want to develop software. To me he seems to believe in the existence of faultless, consistent and complete specifications. I don't believe that the specifications and requirements of sufficiently complex software can have any of these qualities in real life, in part because of the humans that interface with the systems.
I agree. There's plenty of literature supporting almost the opposite of what Dijkstra preaches. While it's good to aim for formal specification, in practice you're likely to overdesign, deliver late and potentially find yourself unable to react quickly to changing requirements. The key is to deliver a working piece of software because handing your customer a page of beautiful mathematical notation is not going to solve their problem.
In addition, the books 'Hackers' by Steven Levy and 'Coders at Work' by Peter Siebel demonstrate various scenarios where a groups of Hackers had to get something done in a short space of time. Almost invariably, they aim for the final product.
