This is true on its own, but seems like a bad standard to hold science to. With normal experiments, it's not enough to say "we ran an experiment that tested the pliability of different materials and found X is most pliable", then say, "you should be able to find that X is most pliable without reusing our method."

The point of publishing a method is so it can be critiqued; I think the same should hold with source code. This should not at all excuse people from trying to reproduce simulations with separate code.

Also, source code lies kind of halfway between experimental measures and mathematical proofs. Again, you are usually expected to give proofs of non-obvious mathematical results, at least in the supplementary section. Similarly, saying "there exists code which produces this result" shouldn't be sufficient unless it's very obvious.

"The point of publishing a method is so it can be critiqued; I think the same should hold with source code. "

Except that source code can sometimes obfuscate the intent.

It's probably better to provide pseudocode. Don't provide source code for your binary sort, say you sorted the data and say on what it was sorted, and let other people use their own preferred sort implementation.

Especially since other labs may not use the same equipment, libraries, languages, etc, so source code may be useless.

"Except that source code can sometimes obfuscate the intent."

The source code, no matter how opaque and poorly written, can never really make things less clear. That's because it must be able to be interpreted by a computer. Good pseudocode and high level descriptions can help illuminate the code, but, as the saying goes, "If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong."

I definitely think it would be great to require/expect pseudocode. I'm not sure if it would be better or worse than providing the original code (hey, why not both?), but it would be a very good standard to adopt.