In my case, I'm not a researcher or even a computer scientist (EE). I'm just a person with a curiosity in various topics. I find the language in papers to be a

In my case, I'm not a researcher or even a computer scientist (EE). I'm just a person with a curiosity in various topics. I find the language in papers to be a big barrier. Even cludgy bad code in ten different languages is more readable to me than the strange symbols and vague diagrams. I agree with you that this is research and there's no reason for it to be pretty. The fact that it's unsightly and brittle makes a lot of people reticent about sharing it online since it could reflect on the quality of their non prototype code. Maintenance is a large burden and once the original goal of the paper has been proved, there's little benefit to the researcher to keep the code around, so I understand why they might say let's not release it at all. A recent example of this was I was building a gesture classifier using an accelerometer to generate data. I decided do use an svm as based on what I had read, it would be the simplest to port to the microcontroller I was using. I was getting decent performance but needed to extract better features. I found several papers talking about the topic with some novel ideas and their impressive results. While it was nice to know that accuracy could get that high, none of the papers explained how the features they extracted were made. It was usually a one or two sentence line about using both time and frequency domain data.