Maslow said:

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.  

I think that it's incorrect to state that programmers must write code because, at the end of the day, that's not really what we do, any more than a musician must play notes. Playing notes is not making music. Playing notes is a part of the process of making music. In that same vein, programmers solve problems. We do so using code, but coding, like playing notes or applying pigments to a canvas, is merely our means of expression.

There's an elegance to  writing code that not only solves a problem but does so well. It follows the Einstien rule (Make it as simple as possible, but no more) and we like to share our code and be acknowledged.

Just a random though.

Josef