Nobody believes me when I say I had three years programming experience before I first touched a computer...
(I can so relate to not knowing what tag is. In my case, it was Star Wars. There was an immigrant in my high school at Spanish class who asked me about it -- eff if I knew -- so we went to another kid and said "Hey, Li here has never heard of Star Wars and all I know is the name, can you fill him in?" "Wait, you've never seen Star Wars." "Something to do with a Death Star, I know." "What country do YOU come from?!")
programming may have appealed to him given his personality, but that doesnt mean his personality is/was fixed and could not have changed... classic model is the TRD (Triadic Reciprocality Determinism) where the personality, behaviours and environment affect each other...
so in this case, he may have been mildly introverted, so the computer (the environment) offered temporary solace to his preference to introversion (personality) resulting in increasing usage (behaviors)...
now i am not saying there is anything wrong with introversion or doing what you enjoy, but you can always argue the benefits of such a choice on lifestyle and how it affects other parts of his life..
the worrying bit is the parents not thinking it was important to "go outside or something"...
That's really scary. I can imagine the conversation. "It's a game that children play." "Chil...dren?"
He's a very sweet, quiet and introverted guy whom some people think of as a little, uh, inaccessible. But as someone else commented, there's no way of determining cause and effect here. I'm inclined to believe he's just the way he is, and programming had little to do with it.
A story from the same project: we were designing something at a whiteboard and I said, about a sort of messaging sequence: It's like a game of frozen tag... when this thingy gets a message, it has to wait until another thingy comes along and starts it again. He said, "Frozen what?" Frozen tag. You know frozen tag? "No, what's that?" Well, you know what tag is, right? The kids' game called tag? "No. What's tag?"
I had to explain what "tag" was.