Like nothing else, coding forces you to identify flaws in your thinking. If your thinking is flawed, your program won't work, except by accident. There's no other discipline quite like this. If you're a mathematician or physicist and you solve a problem wrong, your paper won't tell you. Computer programmers have to measure their thinking against the gold standard of correctness constantly. The process of uncovering and fixing flaws in a program, usually called "debugging", typically takes up the majority of the time spent on software projects.

I agree with the above, but I've also noticed that software engineers don't seem to be more rational than average. E.g., my coworker repeats to himself "there's always a reason" while debugging and at lunch says truth is relative...