[cbgb]

When I was in college, I was once not allowed to join a Complex Analysis course because there were 15 students in the class. College guidelines advise against more than 12 students in a writing-intensive course, and because this was an upper-level Mathematics course, the professor took that to heart (he thought 15 was too much, but some needed the course to graduate).

This is to say that proper abstract Mathematics courses should require the students to write many proofs. I'm sure that students in the aforementioned Complex Analysis course were writing 4 - 7 pages of mathematical prose for their weekly problem sets. This is a non-trivial amount of writing practice which is especially tuned toward accurately expressing the interplay of precisely-defined abstractions (which all documentation should strive for).

Even discrete mathematics courses (Combinatorics, Graph Theory) should eschew simple calculations of permutations/combinations and graph traversal algorithm steps in favor of writing proofs of more of the abstract concepts. In this way, students will be trained to write effectively about abstract concepts, which will prepare them for a career in programming as well.

[jbergens]

I'm not sure that type of writing is anywhere near what you need to do in common programming jobs. As you wrote, it was "4 - 7 pages of mathematical prose...". I interpreted writing as writing text to others, including non-programmers.