I disagree. There are a lot of tools that enable you to code interesting things with very little effort. In fact, because things are so advanced, it is now much easier for people to find interest in programming. "Back in the day" the programs light up a few leds or made a few blocks move. It wasn't impressive. Nowadays, you look at any state-of-art computer game and it's impressive. If you have the drive to understand how things work, you will very likely become interested in computers. I know many developers who came to this industry because of computer games.

Blitz3d. It's a tool for writing 3d games. The nice thing about it is that you can do complex things with very little coding but is, however, very limited. The demo is free and might be a good way to capture his attention.

Society is so fucked up that people are being paid 7 figure salaries to develop smarter gambling algorithms, that produce no real value, when they could help solving science hardest problems. Specially people with this knowledge.

Could you point good introductory books/sites/articles for a programmer interested in this stuff (futures/short selling/derivatives)? No "for-dummies" crap please. Thanks :)