Been thinking about someone's observation that one of the reasons so many people do so much in Excel is that it's actually a *phenomenally* observable programming system and lets people do things they otherwise couldn't.

I think, on much reflection, that this is 100% true. A lot of the bad things that people do in Excel are due to its lack of support for doing things better, but the observability? Top tier, with the next few tiers underneath it completely empty.