This sort of problem with sorting seems like it has always been with us. For example: Bentley quoting Knuth: "in section 6.2.1 of his 'Sorting and Searching,' Knuth points out while the first binary search was published in 1946, the first published binary search without bugs did not appear until 1962" (Programming Pearls 2nd edition, "Writing Correct Programs", section 4.1, p. 34).
I touch a bit on related topics (von Neuman's first program being a sorting program: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/02/hello-world-an-instan... , and quicksort implementations almost always being wrong: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/04/sorting-in-anger/ ) in my blog.