One of my students (CS) once took a creative writing class, and her professor, a man well-known in the creative writing community, told her he thought computer programmers make better writers. She was pretty sure this had a lot to do with understanding revision and outside input. When you write a program, the compiler (or possibly your unit tests) tells you "it's wrong! Fix it!" and doesn't always give a lot of guidance as to how, but you figure it out and come out the other side with a better product. A lot of the other students in the class took the critical comments of the professor (and peers) as almost personal attacks on their perfect creation.
All of which is to say that the Computer Science/Creative Writing benefits may go both ways.
You are forced to purge your mind of every disorganized thought onto paper, and then go back through as often as necessary until it's right.
This may not be a great "programming" strategy, but it certainly makes the design process more fun and productive.