Believe me, very few grad students are writing code to "look smart". First of all, coding isn't exactly a high class activity in most of academia. Any implemen

Believe me, very few grad students are writing code to "look smart". First of all, coding isn't exactly a high class activity in most of academia. Any implementation that's not an uncommented mathematica notebook or matlab mess is in the top 1% of academic code. Second of all, no one reads the code. So while there are incentives to intelli-obfuscate papers to trick naive reviewers, those incentives don't exist with code. (Oh, and it doesn't really work out well in papers either most of the time.)