Please Understand Learning to Code

I'm certainly willing to believe the cited paper (both versions), but it does seem to contradict my own experience in teaching unlikely students how to program. I've found that a excellent litmus test is the ability of the student to follow the recipe on the back of a bag of Chocolate Chips. If the result is at all edible then I am reasonably sure that they can make the necessary leap from that kind of information to that which is needed in programming. A recipe has all of the usual things that a program does, they just look a little different. Sequence, loop, decision etc. Maybe these people would have been in the 'We can program group' of the mentioned test, I don't know---just know I've managed to teach a lot of unexpected folk the basics (often using basic for that matter :) )...