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My mind is still boggling at the thought of a CS degree that doesn't require any actual coding. I always thought that my own school's CS major went too far in the other direction. It was run by the college of engineering, and required that students write a compiler and lexical analyzer, implement all the categories of sort algorithms efficiently and prove that the code was efficient, write a device interrupt handler, and do at least one term-long project in assembler. None of this directly applies to the kind of coding I actually do since I left school. We did no application coding at all. Some basics on writing end-user applications might have been more useful. But we did end up understanding the guts of computing.
I'm considered a reasonably good writer. I have written readable short fiction, and I have written documentation that clearly explains fairly complex ideas to a wide range of audiences. (I'm told this by the readers of said documentation.) I'm also a programmer. I don't know if my writing skills directly help with programming. It seems to me that both logical skills and creative skills are important, both to coding well and to writing well. And to be a good developer, you also need to be able to frame a problem, break it down into chunks, and see what the key structures are to model it.
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