Perhaps this attitude contributes to the problem (I am not excepted from it). If you were given an earful about how your code is an unsalvageable flaming pile of rubbish by everyone you showed it to, would you want to release it alongside a paper to which you've given years of your life?
Yeah no kidding. There's a huge difference between the disposable one-off code produced by a scientist trying to test a hypothesis, and production code produced by an engineer to serve in a commercial capacity.
The original transistor, produced by Shockley and team at Bell Labs, "worked" only in a nominal sense. It didn't do anything other than prove a concept. To turn it into something usable in real equipment took years of effort by other scientists, and engineers. Thank god they published the details of it rather than saying "we made it and it worked, here are the results" because they were afraid of releasing something that was "a pile of rubbish."
