practical benefits of programming?

have you guys made your own program? not a school project or something from a tutorial. nothing work related either. not hacking or sys admin related stuff either.

how would a normal person benefit from programming?

tl;dr uses of programming for non-professionals. I can't think of a way learning programming can help me, unless I was working at some company which required me to program

>>16
Why does f(){ ... } define a function? I thought it was function f { ... } in bash.