To me, that's like a theoretical physicist saying "My job is not to do mathematics" when asked for a derivation of a formula he put in the paper.
Or an experimental physicist saying "My job is not mechanical engineering" when asked for details of their lab equipment (almost all of which is typically custom built for the experiment).
IMO the incentive problem in science (basically number of papers and new results is what counts) also plays into this, as investing tons of time in your code gives you hardly any reward.
On the original hand, these are easier problems than all the years of math education they have. Once you're relying on simulations to get results to explain natural phenomena, it needs to be put on the same pedestal as mathematics.
Writing some tests, using a linter, commenting your code, and learning about best programming practices doesn't take long and pays off - even for yourself when writing the code or you need to touch the code again. "48 hours writing unit tests" is a ridiculous comparison.
This is just complaining that science is too hard because you can't be bother to replicate an experiment.
If you want your results to be usable by others, the quality of the code matters. If all you care is publishing a paper, then I guess sure it doesn't matter if anyone else can build off your work.
The only case where the code would be used (which is a valid reason why it should be available somehow) is to assert that your particular results are flawed or fraudulent; otherwise the quality of the code (or its availability, or even existence - perhaps you could have had a bunch of people do all of it on paper without any code) is simply irrelevant if you want your results to be usable by others.
Not true. Code is often used and reused to churn out a lot more results than the initial paper. A flaw in the code doesn't just show one paper/result as problematic. It can show a large chunk of a researcher's work in his area of expertise to be problematic.
Everything you say is as true for experimental equipment and mathematical tools. Physicists are fantastic at mathematics, yet are one of the most anti-math people I know - in the sense of "Mathematics is just a tool to get results that explain nature! Doing mathematics for its own sake is a waste of time!"
The equation is not the product - the explanation of physical phenomena is. If the attitude of "I don't need to show how I got this equation" is unacceptable, the same should go for code.
No one is insisting on top quality code, but there has to be an acceptance that code can be flawed and that needs to be tested for.
Maybe it wouldn't find any bugs, but give confidence to and encourage other users and increasing your citations and "impact".
Maybe it will just save you 48h later on when you need to adapt the code.
Software engineering has generally accepted that unit testing is a good practice and well worth the time taken. Why do you think science is different?
It's really not, I guess his focus lies on cranking out irreproducible papers.
Theoretical Physicists (literal conversation I had):
>Yeah, this looked like it simplifies to 1-ish and Smart John said it's probably right.
Experimental physicists (another literal conversation):
>Yeah, we build it with duck-tape and there's hot glue holding the important bits that kept falling off. Don't put anything metal in that, we use it as a tea heater, but there's 1000A running through it so it's shoots spoons out when we turn the main machine on.