Do i need to know programming for research paper in ML

for example, researching and writing a new(or improved) ML algorithm requires good programming skills as well?

(Q in more context :

I need to write research papers in ML.

I'm thinking about writing a paper in an improved clustering algorithm.

I know basic syntax of python,java but not expert in any, and don't want to go deeper in these as i hate memorizing all the minor syntaxes and debugging.

I found some CS phd graduates who wrote multiple good papers in good journals but they said they can't do Leetcode at all, which sounds to me they don't know how to code, so i wonder how's that possible writing CS paper but not able to write code, and how i can do that too

)