If you want to inspire someone to learn to program (and I'm on the fence as to whether its really possible to do so if someone isn't inclined to hack things themselves anyway), then present them a real world task from their work/life they couldn't solve with their current tools.
That's exactly the point of these workshops -- to teach librarians, research assistants, scientists, and other sorts of professionals to become more productive via programming. Real-world tasks for them often involve knowing about and manipulating the filesystem (hence command-line craziness), coordination and typesetting (hence Git / LaTeX), and data analysis and visualization (hence Python/JS/d3/etc.). And these folks were motivated to learn to hopefully help their careers. The teachers also had the best possible attitude and patience that I had seen, and yet still there was this schism, which I wrote about.