[rasmusei]

I work as a researcher and I try to publish full source code for all my publications. On the point of increasing surface for nitpicking, I agree in principle that's a risk, but in practice I have not experienced any such problems in my field. I am in a field of applied natural science where most researchers write terrible code, if any, and so I suppose there are not much expectations or even concepts of coding style.

There is a nice Perspective piece in Science from 2011 [1] touching on the question of cleaning up the code. It suggests basically the same thing as several of the comments in this thread: if you don't have time or motivation to clean up the code, don't.

"even incremental steps would be a vast improvement over the current situation. To this end, I propose the following steps (in order of increasing impact and cost) that individuals and the scientific community can take. First, anyone doing any computing in their research should publish their code. It does not have to be clean or beautiful (13), it just needs to be available. Even without the corresponding data, code can be very informative and can be used to check for problems as well as quickly translate ideas. ... The next step would be to publish a cleaned-up version of the code along with the data sets in a durable non-proprietary format."

[1] Peng (2011) Science 334 1126-1127 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1213847