Learning to program takes almost as long as learning to use vi (hah!). Many people learn to program to automate a simple, boring task. Many people learn to program better by automating more of those tasks, before they progress onto "full programs" that have more of a stand-alone nature.

Within those full programs, there are many times when we continue to have a choice between doing it the quick but dumb way, or taking a little more time and doing it the clever and reusable way.

Of course, sometimes this can be taken too far - see yak shaving - but there are many points, while learning to program and while programming, where we face the choice between "do it manually in half an hour" and "take two hours to program something that will do it in 3 seconds". The difference between a programmer and a non-programmer is, largely, that given this type of choice, the programmer will tend to pick the latter option.