Dijkstra's general senitment seems to be that applying existed engineering practices from civil, mechanical, electrical, etc. engineering disciplines to computer science is woefully inadequate. With this, I agree. I also agree that there seems to be some weird set of beliefs in mathematical culture that the human brain is superior to a computer and that no computer could ever do mathematics like a human could (I've seen even prominent mathematicians use Godel's theorem as bogus 'evidence' of this).

But the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative to the status quo of software engineering, not at the moment. The only type of radical new thinking that I am aware of is the functional programming approach to things taken by e.g. haskell. But there are a lot of issues there as well. So far, productivity has been far higher using the more traditional way of doing things.