I don't think that being a physicist gives you a passport for being a great developer (I am not, for example), but there are some very basic characteristics of physicists that are important to point out.

Re this last point: it is true that most physicists will not learn or use Ruby on Rails or Javascript for their Ph.D. work. To build a website or an app, your knowledge of Fortran (still (still  wildly popular among astronomers!) astronomers!)  will not really help. But by default, most physicist will learn C# or C++, as well as basic database languages, and HTML/CSS. Moreover, nearly all physicists (and astronomers) will compile their papers in LaTeX, which is after all a programming language? The next generation of physicists (href="https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/5287/_show_article" target="_blank">some href="https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/5287/_show_article">some  of whom are increasingly becoming data scientists) is more familiar than ever with Python and Javascript (e.g. d3.js). My point is that the gap between the computational skills of a computer scientists and a physicist is getting more and more narrow, as we enter an age where all of physics research requires data handling and computation. Physicists can code.