s/simulation/any real code/. It's still not a square root, which is a total straw man. If it were that simple, there'd be no code to write in the first place.

Okay, instead of 'square root' try spike sorting algorithms for recorded neuron activity. There are various ways of doing it, various software packages, free and commercial, ways of doing it in Matlab, etc.

(Ex: http://www.plexon.com/product/Offline_Sorter.html#Features)

Given a terabyte of recording data, I'd think it should be sufficient to specify the parameters they used for spike sorting. Someone else ought to be able to use a different package on the same data and obtain results similar enough to know if the first person fudged their paper.

Given a set of data, and a named algorithm, it ought to be possible to obtain the same result with any correct implementation of that algorithm.

That's begging the question. Yes, of course a correct implementation will by definition obtain the correct result. I'm questioning the casual way people assume they've got the correct algorithm implemented at all.

Is your paper nothing but off-the-shelf "spike sorting", or is that used as a component of something larger? Rolling back around to the original point of source code release being a desirable thing, if it's the latter, just knowing that this one library was used from what is probably literally a single sentence in the paper that reads "We used spike sorting software X to obtain sorted spikes", when presumably the library has knobs whose settings you don't know and you still don't even have their raw data to check the settings with, you still know virtually nothing about what was actually done. Source release ought to be standard.

The degree to which people who are putatively scientists will go to bat to defend making it difficult or impossible to replicate their experiments boggles my mind.

You're still obstinately missing the point in your nerd rage — letting other people run the same source code does nothing to replicate that part of the experiment — they need an independent implementation to do that! Releasing the source code publicly actively works against that goal because anyone who reads it won't be able to do a black-box implementation.

Besides, the code is almost always worthless compared to collected data. What would actually be most valuable and practicable is for groups to be running their proprietary code on each other's public data for confirmation.