Are writing code and writing text so different?

It seems to me that programming and paper writing modify your brain in incompatible ways. Whenever I have been heavily in programming for a couple of days, I have problems switching to paper writing -- and vice versa. Maybe it is because in paper writing, you are forced to structure your thoughts in a sequential order, whereas in programming, knowing your code structure requires you to keep track of many things in parallel: call and inheritance hierarchies, operation parameters, names of variable, operations, and classes, ...