I have grown a respect for Excel in the last decade or so. It's slow, it's clunky, and it's far from perfect, but I think it's among the most approachable language out there.

A lot of people using Excel, even some of the more advanced stuff like if statements and logic, don't even realize that they're writing programs, and I think that's genuinely awesome: people are able to utilize the power of programming by accident.

I still use spreadsheets all the time for small number crunchy things, just due to how it's "reactive by default". I find it's actually really useful to immediately see everything update after changing a value. Admittedly, I mostly use Google Sheets nowadays simply because it's "good enough" and much easier to share with friends. Could I write a program to do all that number crunching that performs better? Obviously yes, I could start a new Julia project and mop the floor with Excel or Google Sheets in regards to saving cycles, but that would take me 20x longer and I'd lose all the nice features of a spreadsheet.

Granted, this is coming from a strictly Anglo-American perspective; I cannot speak to Excel's ability to use other languages.