You've got a good point! The post under discussion actually contains a slightly modified version of the email I sent to my friend. The original version had a paragraph toward the end that more specifically tried to show her a few ways that programming could be relevant to her daily life - she's got a job that would particularly benefit from some automation in the form of a few self-rolled Ruby scripts.

I've given a variation of this "how to start programming" email to someone else before, and with that person I made the mistake of not pointing out how programming could be relevant to their daily life; I think that email was significantly less useful as a result, so I'm trying to iterate a little bit.