A lot of people feel programming is undervalued in academia. For instance Hadley Wickham creator of ggplot2 probably hasn't gotten the recognition he deserves. With a prevailing attitude such as that is it any wonder academic code has such a poor reputation?
Whickham notes that he thinks tides are changing. I agree that it is, as a part of the datascience phenomenon. As part of the change you are going to see a few more macbooks, some cloud servers, maybe a guy with glasses talking about version control and software design. It is not all garbage, I hope you keep an open mind.
Q:Do you feel that the academic culture has caught up with and supports non-traditional academic contributions (e.g. R packages instead of papers)?
A:It’s hard to tell. I think it’s getting better, but it’s still hard to get recognition that software development is an intellectual activity in the same way that developing a new mathematical theorem is.[1]