[atq2119]

I suspect it could be that real analysis truly makes you challenge your assumptions and forces you to build a habit of thinking through corner cases.

Other maths courses do this as well, but real analysis is particularly vivid for some people because of all the fun counter-examples you get to see in a well-taught course, such as a function that is everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable.

This habit of thinking through corner cases is something I miss from a lot of (junior) programmers.