Edit: Tony Hoare isn't a successor, but he's a living genius who shares many of Dijkstra's inclinations.
From Dijkstra's time we've seen partial adoptions and spinoffs from these insights. Using lambda calculus and static types gets you program behavior that looks a lot like refinement calculus and invariants (since types label domains that are equivalent to predicate sets, and lambda calculus computation is the substitution model).
For that reason I would say that the spiritual successor's to Dijsktra are in the functional programming community, particularly Haskell and Scala: Erik Meijer, Richard Bird, Martin Sapolsky, etc.
Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science curriculum is also fairly integrated across the board to use this style of programming and mathematics.
It baffles me that the "formal methods" (it really should be called automated methods) crowd not only ignores this lesson, but is completely blind to it. In my direct experience, the ones I've spoken to are so obsessed with verification that the idea of constructing a program that has specified properties apparently isn't even thinkable for them. Perhaps it's a defect in my ability to explain things, but I've never once managed to explain to one of them that construction is a significantly easier task than verification. It's a real shame because they're very intelligent people that I'm certain could contribute greatly to formal program derivation. I suppose it's one of those "professional deformations" Dijkstra occasionally mentions. One of the things I'd like to do when I have copious free time is build an Emacs mode that only allows edits that preserve the given invariants, perhaps using TLA+ or something similar.
Anyone that wants to learn more on the subject of deriving programs should read one or both of A Discipline of Programming[1] and Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics[2]. The former is more approachable for the programmer who isn't as inclined toward formal mathematics. The latter basically takes the same concepts and treats them with much greater mathematical rigor.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2276288.A_Discipline_of_...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3144463-predicate-calcul...
He's from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He worked and lived most of his life in The Netherlands and lived and worked about 15 years in Texas, according to Wikipedia.
As Sherlock Holmes observes; Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!; we the "great unobservant programming public" when it comes to mathematical underpinnings of Computer Programming need to be taught and frequently reminded of the importance of "logical analysis and proof deduction". :-)
That said, his non-technical EWDs can be pretty cutting. He didn't suffer those whom he saw as fools gladly. At least in his writings his humor is extremely dry.
[1] A rabbit in this context is a result that is a surprise, as if it had been pulled out of a hat.
A couple years later I saw a quote that reminded me of that interaction and it goes “I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.”
Dijkstra's ghost haunts us all.
> Occasionally he used a long “reading pipe”, until once, deep in thought, he bumped it into a door and hurt himself in the throat. Then he switched to cigarettes.
"One of Edsger’s most peculiar idiosyncrasies (after 1970) was his vow never to use a computer."
"Edsger had contributed significantly to a well-founded, rigorous approach to programming, in establishing it as an engineering science. I therefore awaited eagerly the appearance of a textbook, a fundamental guide to programming from his pen. But he had lost his interest in this endeavor, and instead concentrated exclusively on mathematical treatments and theories."
So Wirth himself decided to write it viz. Systematic Programming: An Introduction.
