I've been trying for years to get my girlfriend interested in programming, because she is a logical person and I am absolutely convinced she would enjoy commanding the computer billions of times a sec (after all she does enjoy doing that to me, so... haha). But so far no success. :(
Please share a story and some advice.
You can code in Javascript or C# in unity, but I chose to teach C# because the Intellisense/Code Completion in the editor is better.
Also having short concrete goals sped up the effort -> reward cycle, with thing he actually wanted to do in his games
My current girlfriend already understands Excel pretty well, I've helped her use some more advanced features from it for work tasks. I've asked if she wanted to learn how to program, she said no. I'm a nerd, programming and math are a too large percentage of my thoughts most days so she hears me talking about it anyways. She's picked up on some things, but she'll probably never be a programmer (which is fine, she's better off in her current career from a personal-satisfaction perspective).
I don't try to teach her anything, nor have I tried to teach any previous partner. If people are interested they'll ask, if not I thinking trying to force knowledge upon them would be misplaced and unwelcome.
Reading the replies here I can see that it doesn't seem to end well most of the time. People are different, have different interests, and different tastes.
(Now I wonder what partners have tried to teach you, that you've rejected?)
He's a social worker who runs a group home for intellectually disabled adults, and he's been in this career for 15 years now, and he loves it. There's absolutely no reason for him to get into programming, and he's had enough opportunities over the years that if he were drawn to it he would have already done it.
He's certainly supportive of my work, he brags to his friends about cool things I've done, he knows enough to talk about what I do, but as far as actually doing it himself, he just doesn't care. I think you need to be okay with your girlfriend not being a programmer. I mean, do you feel a drive to pick up her career as a hobby? :-p
For most people, "fun" is building something you can play with. Web development falls nicely into this category - even now I'd still recommend learning Ruby and then Ruby on Rails for a first language/framework. Ruby is a beautiful language and RoR lets a beginner make working prototypes without overwhelming them.
Others might enjoy parsing large sets of data, making games, or other things. Figure out what they enjoy and the rest will follow.