Kudos to @jonathoda for bringing this to my attention via tweet, here is a blistering article from the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science article https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz029 entitled "Is peer review a good idea?". As an outsider to computer science academia, I found that the small group of gatekeepers was an incestuous bunch which only publishes each other, and represents a small clique who thrives on exclusivity, and blocked me the one time I tried to publish about Beads for vague reasons. A working product is better proof than a paper without proof, so it wasn't going to stop me, but it would have been nicer had i been able to publish the major features in an article so that I could get credit for the novel things. It is one of the forms of alternative payment currencies, to get credit for an invention or improvement. It is one of the reasons people publish, in addition to the communist ideal of increasing the public wealth.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project there are unwritten requirements for getting papers published, handed down verbally from advisor to student. It's almost impossible if you haven't been on the inside. Nevertheless, once you learn the code, getting published may be more likely to have a long-term impact than having your product become popular.

@jonathoda how true. Getting published is almost as mysterious as getting a grant. I tried a few times to get a grant but was unsuccessful. One time i bid on a USAID project on Tanzania, where i was going to ship container loads of paper and HP LaserJets with satellite internet to a small set of towns outside the capital, so they could print textbooks on demand that were created by a small staff in the capital, with bilingual versions for the regional languages. With a net price of about $3 per 100 page book, it was the most cost effective textbook delivery system imaginable, and the state dept liked the project and we were in the final contention, but the big textbook company that was planning to sell the typical books for $80 a book got them to delay the offering and kills us because we couldn't keep hanging onto a project that never starts at a predictable time. You can't hold a staff without already having projects. Knowing how to navigate the grant system is a truly dark art, and the people who know how to wrangle grants on a consistent basis earn a lot of money and have ultimate job security. One of the groups i bumped into called their Washington office "proposal island", because it becomes a continuous process.