If he passes on that, Lua would be a good option. It has all of the goodies we'd expect with JS or Python (other than being the only language you can run in someone else's browser), but lacks a great deal of bloat, unintuitive scoping rules, and gotchas associated with weak typing/falsiness/that's-a-unicode-when-i-wanted-a-str.
Above all else, though, he should probably pick something other than Java.
My rationale here is that Racket or Lua will make it easy for him to learn programming because the language will be so simple as to require almost no time to learn. Then, ideally, he can use his established knowledge of programming with whatever other language he likes. Learning some larger language like Python or Ruby first would be more difficult, but is not a bad idea. Learning Java first will be even more difficult and may cause long-term damage depending on the amount of OOP koolaid he ingests.