"Kids who grew up with touch devices" may not necessarily make better programmers, but there's such factor as being comfortable with tools, I guess. It's like

"Kids who grew up with touch devices" may not necessarily make better programmers, but there's such factor as being comfortable with tools, I guess. It's like the language. You spend a lot of time observing and using the system (writing, speaking)—even without full understanding—and you get comfortable: you easily distinguish between characters, recognize speech, can quickly and legibly write. It takes much less effort to apply this knowledge to do successfully things that may require it. Likewise, if you spend a lot of time around computers, it takes much less effort then to use them for many things, including programming, since computers (or, maybe in future, touch devices) are tools we use for programming.