I think this might be why I consider those of us with degrees in the physical/mathematical sciences to be good programmers. Admittedly, I'm biased; my degree is in astrophysics. However, I've worked with people who studied physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, etc, and we had to spend a good bit of our undergraduate and graduate days analyzing big masses of data, trying to find out why, say, these four stars have more ultraviolet emission lines than expected, or whatever. That makes excellent training for programming against data that comes from a variety of sources, or when specs aren't 100% complete, or having to do a little quick improvisational programming, and so on.

Just my $.02.