It doesn't hurt anything to have some people out there in other fields with a good working knowledge of how programming works. In fact, I would say nearly every field needs people in it who are also, or have also been, programmers, people who have a good idea how to guage the difficulty of a programming problem and know what kinds of information programmers need in order to develop solutions that will really meet the needs of the field. People who can talk to the programmers and help them understand what is wanted -- and understand what they are saying too. (The reverse is also needed: programmers with a background in the field in question.)

I am in almost the opposite of your situation: I certainly have the temperament to enjoy programming. I thrive on solitude, and get grumpy if I spend too many consecutive hours around people, especially if they're talking all the time about things of no technical importance. There is little I like better than to be the only person within earshot for hours at a time. I strongly prefer written forms of communication, because they let me revise what I'm saying before people read it. Some of my personal programming projects that I did for fun were hundreds of lines long way back when I was first learning to program using GW-BASIC, so you know I don't mind a little heads-down dev time.

I'm not sure I'm cut out, skill-wise, to be a full-time programmer. Maybe I am. I've never had the chance to try, really. I'd probably have to move to a big city to find out, or else commute, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to do either of those things, so. Nonetheless, I do get to do some programming as a part of my job, and I find significant applications for programming in my personal life as well. I wrote my own playlist-generation algorithm for my music collection, and I like it rather better than standard "shuffle". I wrote a tool (that I'm thinking about putting on CUFP one of these days) to help with memorization, because I'm involved in a quizzing program. And so on and so forth. So although I am not a full-time programmer as such, I certainly do some programming on a fairly regular basis.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that programming doesn't have to be an all-consuming forty-hours-a-week career in order to be useful and worthwhile.