[jfv]

Everyone gets into coding a different way. If she is inclined toward design, I would definitely start with HTML and go from there.

As a new coder even things like learning the tree-like structure of HTML, the brutality of an errant slash or missed closing tag, or the frustrations of bringing a visual idea to fruition with plain text are challenging enough. I wouldn't worry too much about HTML "not being real code".

If time is on your side (more than a year), I would gently nudge her into HTML and see what she comes up with. If she finds it tedious maybe try another route, but if it sticks I would segue into simple Javascript or CSS after that depending on what she wants. If she wants more control over how the page looks, naturally she'll want to learn CSS. If she wants more control over functionality and making the page "do" something, Javascript.

As a completely radical idea, you could show her LOGO. I remember that being incredibly inspirational when I was a kid and appealing to the artistic side.

If time is on your side, you are lucky in that she can afford to play around and not go down the bootcamp route which will inevitably lead to burnout. I say nurture the interest as gently as possible.

[lettergram]

My wife actually got into programming using netlogo, then processing. It's all about agents, and her work was trying to explain how aggression leads to sociality. It provided a nice clean (and fun) interface for tweaking parameters and seeing how creatures "evolve".

From there she learned some python and Ruby. It was a pretty naturual progression, she just wanted to "do stuff"