**Short answer**: You are at the cross road situation of blaming the game, the player, or neither. Show the paper/journal to your supervisor or someone in a senior position if you can; to help you with your decision. 

**Longer answer**: It all comes down to one thing: whether writing a piece of code is a contribution or not. Well, it is actually a grey area. I would judge a computer science paper/journal, with code, like the following: 

1. **Know the Context and the Promises**: What is the context? Is it just a tool that demonstrates something? Or a language that promises that it does wonders? If it is heavily code oriented, then the code should be presented clearly in the publication. 

2. **Semantical Backup**: Do the author(s) prove their promises with semantics? How deep do they go into their semantics?  

3. **Clean Links Between Semantics and Programs**: Do they clearly demonstrate the relation between the semantics and the program? If not, it is a red flag in my opinion. Something is lacking here and the authors are hiding something. 

4. **Track Records of The Authors**: You can also simply look at their records as well, see what they did achieve so far; and base some judgement on this as well. 

5. **Some extra work**: You could also look at their code as well, if they provided a link. It is not hard to compile any mainstream languages, most likely a one line command will compile the code and you can see for yourself. You can even copy/paste part of their code into a search engine box, and take it from there. 

**Conclusion**: You see all these points are not hard hitting rules that help you with judging an implementation part of the paper. It is the best to get a helping hand by a senior academic (e.g., supervisor) to look into it to help you with your decision.