[Joof]

I know a professor working on a potentially important project that won't release his code and I suspect it's precisely for this reason. The communuty would tear him apart for sure, but it would be worthwhile to release it anyway.

[jhbadger]

This is a real problem in academia and not just because of superficial coding-style issues that the authors might be fearing criticism for. There is a real probability of serious bugs. There have been papers that have had to be retracted because the analysis software used was later discovered to have bugs that caused incorrect results (things being called statistically significant that weren't, and so on).