Code repositories rot.

The pseudocode does not. But you don't have to spend 5 years learning how to read the special, very ideographic language (unlike code, it's two dimensional).

The number one thing you understand as a programmer with moderate understanding of how compilation and interpretation is done on computer languages, is that the concrete language is not as important as the Abstract Syntax Tree, and once you have the AST, you can generate the code for any language.

Thus, the choice of language notation in a paper is something I think in fact the academic tradition is impeding.

We don't live in a world of dusty books, and Sparc thin clients running off a mainframe in the middle of the campus.

We live in the modern world where in theory you could build an operating system on a mobile phone device. Simple, tedious, but possible. Most of the old papers still being read by CS students predate the appearance of parallel processing on PCs. Distributed systems have been out of the academic arena for decades but still the papers on it are written so that it excludes hobbyists and autodidacts like myself.