Program or just play?

Yesterday I typed in the printout of a chess program I wrote back in 2000 to 2002. It was the only way I had to get that old program back because I lost it when the hard drive on my old computer crashed around the beginning of last year. That was 863 lines of typing. Then I spent the rest of the day debugging the mistakes I made while typing, until the program was working well enough to referee a random game against itself. (It played to checkmate in 114 moves in .49 seconds.) Since I've been starting to learn C, I was thinking of translating that program or some of it from QBasic into C, by hand, as an exercise in learning C.

What is the point? Chess is for playing. For fun. I want to play real games of chess, which means games with human players. I still haven't loaded any of the CDs of brand-name chess programs I have onto this laptop, since I got it at the beginning of November. I can just come here and play chess and it's better because it's real. I'm wondering if I can put the energy and logic I would have put into chess programming today into learning to play better.