HN user
Talk by Dr. Gerard Holzmann (leads the JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6yDubV3a9I
You can also search for the paper/final report: "NASA Study on Flight Software Complexity" to expand the topic.
I work for a small company (not a software/tech one) as a sysadmin and programmer and sometimes I feel almost ashamed of scripts or pieces of software because I know that they could be implemented much better or cleaner or this or that. I have some delusion that programmers working at other companies make better design decisions, better code, better tests, etc.
I love to read other programmer's battle stories! (I am currently reading "Coders at Work" and really enjoying it).
Thanks for sharing!
BTW, Levenshtein distance is implemented in Clojure under the Incanter project (incanter.stats).
Just as a note: Published in one of the journals (Psychological Science) that was mentioned a few days ago in another article about trying to replicate psychological experiments as part of the Open Science Framework ("Is Psychology About to Come Undone?" http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to...).