Illustration, music and dance have been studied for thousands of years, but you can still tell who’s passionate about them from an early age: they do unskilled {drawing, singing, dancing} for fun. Even though there is basically no chance of their work having an impact on anyone at their skill level, they still do it. Mostly because their parents and teachers tell them nothing about how their work measures up by objective standards, instead encouraging them and appreciating anything that demonstrates growth in their skills compared to previous pieces.

I don’t see why programming is any different. There’s not much difference between a crude drawing of a house in crayon, and a crude Pong clone in Scratch.