Ten simple rules for the open development of scientific software

What you and others are saying is that what's missing is the software engineering. People can write code to consume and produce data in order to demonstrate something, get published, and so on, but if others are to benefit from that code in any convenient way, there's the usual amount of software engineering required to achieve this.

Some might dispute whether sharing the code is necessary, but if any algorithm is going to be described in detail - and I doubt that they are described in sufficient detail, especially in disciplines other than pure computer science - then it would be better if the code were available, better still if it could be conveniently used in order to rule out coincidental hardware- or infrastructure-related effects, and even better still if it were well-structured and well-documented. Once again, software engineering is the missing ingredient.

Unfortunately, the funding in many environments probably doesn't cover anything beyond getting something working and getting a paper out the door (and thus attracting more funding). After all, there's always another Web service to use or another bundle of Java class files to stuff into the JVM to massage one's data and produce a "result", and nobody's asking for money, so what's the problem? Right? That's probably the prevailing attitude that needs changing.