I would think that most readers/reviewers would find a sufficiently detailed algorithm enough. You write your paper showing, oh, C++ code, and I use SPSS in my shop -- your code is useless to me. Not that most readers would enjoy reimplementing the code (especially for non-CS papers), but with a specific code that runs on a specific platform, there's bound to be a lot of clutter to wade through. An algorithm reduces it to its bare essentials.

If my paper is showing the improvement in speed of my new Quicksort method over the standard Bubble Sort, showing algorithms for the two methods would make it easier to support my claims for O (n log n) vs O (n^2) speedup. If my paper is on population age distributions in wealthy vs developing economies, unless there's a really neat trick I used to process the data, most readers probably wouldn't even care about the algorithm, except in very broad brushstrokes.

It's going to depend on the subject area (general, say, Computer Science) and the specific subarea (say, sorting methods), as well as how heavy an impact the algorithm used has on the results, as to whether the algorithm is necessary. If I'm showing compiler differences in Fortran code, then it would be good to include actual code. Otherwise, code itself is rarely of interest.

Why are papers without code but with results accepted?
I have seen people who wrap the Tefilin 7 times around their arm and some that wrap it 8 times around their arm. Why do the people who wrap it 8 times do so?
