What is the real importance of programming

Answer 1

It's a tool at your disposal.
As every tool it will be helpful for certain jobs. As technology is evolving and becoming ubiquitous in our lives, you can expect a great deal of help from your programming skills.
Learning programming in this era can be considered like learning to read in the middle age: it can make a really big difference...
...but you don't need to be a priest :)

Answer 2

It depends of your point of view.

For the user, it has many uses such as :
- entertainment ;
- make a task easier ;
- make something do a task you should have done yourself ;
- helps you do things a human could not normally do (some mathematical theories can't be used without the help of a computer, doing the mean of millions of values could be tiresome, ...) ;
- ...

For the developer, the main reason is (or at least should be) self-satisfaction.