I fully agree, and would actually go a lot further. A very large number of research papers I've read in my life were so poorly written as to being near impossi

I fully agree, and would actually go a lot further. A very large number of research papers I've read in my life were so poorly written as to being near impossible to understand. The time it took to infer the actual meaning of certain parts of certain papers was vastly larger than just reading the code would have been. It has become very clear to me that being a strong CS researcher does not necessarily imply mastery of language or even the very basic ability to explain one's ideas. As a matter of fact, with very few exception (eg Feynmann), the two skills seem to be at odds with one another. On the other hand, code can be read and understood much more readily, especially when it can be experimented with, if only to insert printfs in it to understand what it does. The culture of scientific publication in CS must change. The "I'm pressured by my advisor and therefore have no time to publish my code" argument is complete bollocks. The code should come first and your advisor should pressure you to publish that first (assuming it actually works). If someone wants to read your poorly worded explanation of how it works, fine, publish a paper. Show me the code first.