[chrisseaton]

I can list many major influential papers in computer science that described an idea and didn't really give any concrete code, where we're still using the idea today.

For example the paper on polymorphic inline caching, which is the key idea for the performance of many programming languages today, just described the idea, and didn't present any code. How was it evaluated? People sat and thought about it. Holds up today.

You can reason about an idea through other things than concrete code. Code is transient and incidental. Ideas persist.

[d110af5ccf]

I think you're talking past each other. Both are true under different circumstances. In some cases an abstract idea is the important takeaway. In other cases the central point of a paper is to present conclusions that were arrived at based on analysis of some dataset. If the code used to generate or analyze the dataset is wrong then conclusions based on it likely worthless.