If he shows any interest, get him to do something *he* wants the computer to do. Maybe write some shareware? That way he's going to see programming my contribute to his wallet.

Great idea -- we downloaded one IDE package and he was all keen to use it till he found out it was shareware. I'm not against shareware, I bought a few packages in the 80's and 90's, but I don't think he's quite up to that level yet. I want to get him started gently.

But as others have said, if he doesn't show the interest, pushing him to it is probably going to drive him away.

Understood -- it's not that he isn't showing interest, I just think he needs to get engaged. I imagine his brain is like this enormous engine with huge potential, and it's just sitting on a siding somewhere idling, when it could be pulling huge trains of cars up mountains. He just needs the right kind of trigger.

If you're on a Mac you don't need to download any shareware IDE. Just install XCode off the OS X CD (usually the second disk). It's free with the OS and a pretty spiffy environment that'll let you code in ObjectiveC, Java, Perl, or Ruby (the later two with the appropriate libraries like CamelBones or RubyCocoa).