My PhD was in computer science and my experience was quite similar.
I wrote probably around 3000 lines of code on 4 separate projects (mostly MATLAB, C and Java). This code was never shared with anyone, my advisors were not interested in the code, all they cared about were the results. To be honest it wasn't very good code, I would have a hard time understanding it now (although I could probably figure it out eventually).
And after I graduated I took the code with me and I am the only person who ever verified the working of the code.
This bothers me on some level, since no one can really verify and inspect the results of my publications (unless they tracked me down to ask me for the code some of which has been lost) - but it is pretty much the norm in my field.
There was an interesting discussion about this on the Theoretical Computer Science Stackoverflow a while back:
Bottomline: Yes, we should probably do it (especially in areas where the research is simulation and the code encapsulates all the results) but we probably won't unless we're pushed.
I have a PhD in Comp. Sci. too, and continue working in academia.
Regarding your code, you could have just uploaded it to SourceForge or any other OpenSource repository. I know a guy (Steve Phelps) who did exactly that ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasa/ ) with his PhD code.
On a related note, the institute where I am working now has this "great" simulation program (housemade in C++) for which a lot of publicatios have been written. However, the code is closed source and thus cannot be third-party verified.
This is wrong, and actually, a colleague of mine who just started doing her PhD found an error in the simulation program, bad enough that it makes me question the previous research.
In my opinion it must be a requirement that all software related to a publication must be made open-source before (or at the same time) the paper is published.
In the traditional research method, computer programs are part of the methods of the reserach. It is amazing that nowadays researchers can publish research without clearly showing the process they used to arrive to those.
I wrote probably around 3000 lines of code on 4 separate projects (mostly MATLAB, C and Java). This code was never shared with anyone, my advisors were not interested in the code, all they cared about were the results. To be honest it wasn't very good code, I would have a hard time understanding it now (although I could probably figure it out eventually).
And after I graduated I took the code with me and I am the only person who ever verified the working of the code.
This bothers me on some level, since no one can really verify and inspect the results of my publications (unless they tracked me down to ask me for the code some of which has been lost) - but it is pretty much the norm in my field.
There was an interesting discussion about this on the Theoretical Computer Science Stackoverflow a while back:
http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/5361/code-in-aca...
Bottomline: Yes, we should probably do it (especially in areas where the research is simulation and the code encapsulates all the results) but we probably won't unless we're pushed.