[ColinWright]

    ... friend from civil engineering background
    who would like to start programming.

Why? Is this just a vague thing of "programming seems like the thing to do" or does she have things in mind that programming will enable? Does she want to get a job in programming, or does she need it as a tool for her own interests?

Without specific things to do, problems to solve, and itches to scratch, getting and staying motivated is really hard.

    ... the way it was taught (many small programs)
    really discouraged her.

Why did many small programs discourage her? What was it about that? All programs start as "Hello World" and then get grown.

Without specific tasks to perform it's hard to suggest a place to start. If she will have no problem with motivation then I'd suggest "Learning Python the Hard Way." If she has specific small things to do, find a mentor and start mutating small programs. Or start with Khan Academy or Codecademy and see where the motivation disappears - then analyse why.

[malpiatko]

She doesn't like her field and looking at what I do, she thinks this might be the career choice for her. The small programs where basically a variety of tasks to perform with "for loop" which is quite boring. The reason why you outpul "hello world" is to make you feel you progressed and it's not the case when you spend half a year outputting different numbers after writitng 10 lines of code.

[ColinWright]

Using the "Hello World" program is not about making you feel like you're making progress, it's about ensuring that you understand your end-to-end process. You need to:

* Create a program

* Compile and/or invoke

* Find the output

Then everything else is about increasing that processing you do between input and output.

Learning programming simply because you think it will be a good career is hard. I would suggest starting on Project Euler[0] and concentrating not just on solving the problems, but solving the projects well. Reflecting on the quality of code means you stop just hacking out something that works, and worry about readability, maintainability, and other such important issues.

HMWV, but that's my $0.02

[0] https://projecteuler.net/