Excel is a tool, and it's a really good tool for what it does, which is for applications that require: - very fast iteration cycles - a particular data model: grid of numbers which is very common in business world - support for everything under the sun: persistence (just hit save :), dialog UI, math formula, stats models, string functions, date/time functions (better than even Java's Joda), internationalization, localization, utf 8, and plenty more