Nick Barnes has written an interesting article on why scientific code should be published, with particular reference to John Graham-Cumming's work on the Russell review code.
This report included a good algorithmic description, and has been accompanied by source code. We greatly welcome both of these departures from the norm, as setting a good example and following the report’s own recommendation. These facts also allow us to illustrate particular reasons why code release is important, and why science software skills should be improved.
The four separate bugs – in the description, in the code, in the configuration, and in the expectation of the reader – are, in this case, trivial and unimportant – they do not affect the broad results of the report in any way. However, each is characteristic of problems with science software which can be more serious, and which are impossible to discover unless code is released.