Some do, yes. Generally, anything that I'm going to want to make easily accessible to others for use will probably require it. I have lots of ideas I want to implement, but they mostly involve data-mining and machine learning, which would involve applying a routine to large datasets, and I want to be able to build off of others' work. Basically, implementations of an inference engine.

(One "toy" program I wrote was a program that generates a Markov model of given body of text -- i.e., for a given string length, collect all strings in the text of that length and find what characters are likely to come after instances of that text, and then randomly generate a new text from a given string. I know it's not a new idea, etc., but that was just to get my feet wet. And I was limited to command line and reading in a local file.)

Also, I want to model control systems from an information-theoretic and thermodynamic perspective: what energy flows and entropy generation happen in order to keep a system stable, and perhaps replicate.

Being able to do more work with the brain signals requires more programming knowledge too.