To me, everything in that article can be addressed with a little experience.
My one indicator that someone is going to be a bad programmer actually has little to do with technical skill sets, but rather personality. As my sanity check, I make sure to examine the open-mindedness (willingness to research and use unfamiliar tools) of programmers. More often than not, you find programmers who are very comfortable in given languages, environments, tools etc, but once you take away their comfort blanket, they keep reaching back for it.
An extreme example would be a scenario such that a programmer who knows C very well decides to do a decent amount of parsing in C instead of researching better languages for the job such as python or perl.
My one indicator that someone is going to be a bad programmer actually has little to do with technical skill sets, but rather personality. As my sanity check, I make sure to examine the open-mindedness (willingness to research and use unfamiliar tools) of programmers. More often than not, you find programmers who are very comfortable in given languages, environments, tools etc, but once you take away their comfort blanket, they keep reaching back for it.
An extreme example would be a scenario such that a programmer who knows C very well decides to do a decent amount of parsing in C instead of researching better languages for the job such as python or perl.