I am particularly skeptical of the author's suggestion that developing a domain-specific language would be one of the ways to teach general thinking skills through programming. Absent an example to prove me wrong, I would think that writing a DSL is so laden with task-specific minutiae that those parts of the job that extend general thinking skills would be highly diluted.

On the other hand, I think programming helps with one thing: programs are, in some sense, half-way between the physical world of discrete objects, and the abstract world of words and symbols. I have seen it suggested (but I cannot find the reference) that all abstract reasoning developed from an ability to mentally model the physical world. If so, then programming may be a stepping-stone from the latter to the former (though only if it is taught as such; most programming instruction makes programming the goal, not a waypoint (which is not surprising))