> Code is little more than a very formal way to describe an algorithm, the difference between a detailed algorithm and a piece of code is very small in many cases. And in the cases where the given algorithm is general and no code is given, reproducibility is at stakes.
If you follow discussions about how to comment code properly, you will see that an important thing to understand to comment code properly is the fact that your comment should not describe the code, but explain the code. In science, the explanation is a very very very important part of what the community wants. The fact that this distinction exists for comments is the proof that "just the code" is not enough.
Then, yes, of course, it does not hurt to give the code. I have NEVER said otherwise. But just re-read the discussion: my point is that, in practice and in reality, the EXPLANATION is way more important than the description in scientific research, and, because of that, the scientific community is way more interested in discussing the explanation rather than the description (not that it is 100% useless, the same way that discussing plenty of other things is not 100% useless).
> ... reproducibility is at stakes.
True. But in this case, trying to solve that by giving the code is the worst way of solving reproducibility. If the EXPLANATION is not well done, than the science is not there. If you can't reproduce because you don't have a good explanation, than, the solution is to fix the explanation, not to give an unexplained code. Describing the code will NOT fix that, but will let bad science being used ("well, I have the code. I don't know exactly why they have done like that, but I can run the code, so let's use it")
> But ideally you want both: the description of the procedure to rewrite an equivalent program, and the actual code that gave the results detailed in the article. This is happening more and more frequently, and this is a good thing.
No one so far in this discussion disagrees with that. If I was not trying to strongly give the benefit of the doubt, I would be tempted to conclude from this discussion that this disproportionate reaction to just "they are not interested in the code" is from few persons who are totally oblivious of how science works, but are somehow triggered by the idea that the code is not the most important thing in the scientists eyes.
It just comforts me in the idea that some computer scientists have no idea of what are the tensions when doing science (some computer scientists, not all) and just refuse even to consider that maybe it is simply slightly different.