Try finding something that he likes, that could be enhanced with programming to start with. Mine was fantasy basketball, doing it with the help of computers is so much better than by hand.
And keep it approachable! There is nothing wrong with writing that fantasy basketball calculator as a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets have many advantages that get overlooked by pushing for a "real language" while jump into a programming language involves learning a lot of new concepts at once.
For example, spreadsheets make all the memory visible at once. It makes sense like a piece of paper. You also have intuitive understanding of your algorithms memory consumption. Computing something for N by N obviously uses N^2 cells. Many problems will be solved in 2^n which will mean dragging down that cell for a short while at low values and suddenly a very long while.
Spreadsheets have many advantages that get overlooked by pushing for a "real language" while jump into a programming language involves learning a lot of new concepts at once.
For example, spreadsheets make all the memory visible at once. It makes sense like a piece of paper. You also have intuitive understanding of your algorithms memory consumption. Computing something for N by N obviously uses N^2 cells. Many problems will be solved in 2^n which will mean dragging down that cell for a short while at low values and suddenly a very long while.