Talk is cheap, show me the code ...

For quite a few days, this was my favourite one-liner. Supposedly said by Linus Torvalds, this statement for me carried the true attitude of a programmer. Someone who loves coding, and doesn't care for much else. It's the I-don't-care-for-the-world attitude that struck me, much like Eminem, to whom I listen a lot.

Then the other day, Pascal told me that he was preparing for his project demonstration (he has implemented a chess game playable over a network with his friends). The code was in Java, and they spent an entire day preparing for the 'big day'. It seems they were coaching themselves to explain their code to the instructor. This seemed unnecessary to me, I told him - 'Function is more important than form'.

What went wrong here?? I myself can't understand it, on one hand, I believe in 'Show me the ...', on the other, I advised Pascal to not give the code much importance. What part of me was right? Any suggestions?