Might not be dumb, but I learned programming to create things and learn how things worked. Started with entering in hundreds of lines of BASIC printed in magazines, including debugging font typos.

Then learned MUF, or Multi-User Forth, a stack-based text language for creating text based dungeons, and managed to stop some malicious users spying and people's privacy in the server.

Every so often, I pick up a new language to test it to see if it does cool stuff or help me further learn more about how things function.