The first thing that scare those people is the whole "plain text" thing. Spelling errors in programming are not forgiving and that's the first thing learners have trouble with.

One example that comes to mind is science. There often is data to process, and excel can obviously do many things, but I'm really confident that more could be done.

Programming feels like something that is often done by experts, but it really really doesn't have to.

Of course, programmers often disagree that beginners should be given tools to replace experts programmers, but it's still better to have someone who can do the job of a programmer.