I read a stat somewhere that there are at least an order of magnitude more Excel "programmers" in the world than all pro developers in other languages combined.

And looking at how much work is involved even getting a JavaScript frontend set up, I’m pretty sure the Excel programmers are yet another order of magnitude more productive than the latter.

Which is kinda sad actually.

I agree. I worked as an analyst where due to security policies we only had VBA. There was application which consisted of an Access DB for a "front end" (containing an interface to input data, generate reports in ppt/excel, etc) which connected to another access database as the "back end" and an admin console to pull in data from a SQL database. I had a lot of fun maintaining it.

Yeah I know MS Access & Co. have kind of a bad rap, but if I look at what we were able to actually achieve for the business/users with those tools, it’s really painful to see how little progress we have made in the last 20 years or so.

At that point you're abusing the word niche

Thus the "Heh".