Actually every programming languages have advantages and disadvantages over each other in terms of speed, flexibility, compatibility with various platforms, integration with each other, development time needed, etc. but what makes excel powerful tool is that it provides quick, dirty, flexible, easy to maintain solutions to almost all kinds of applications. Also, there are programming languages which are mainly targeted to one specific group of people for example MATLAB is mainly for mathematicians, engineers and for people involved in related field requiring numerical calculations. Functional languages have their target people but excel is universal in terms of use. It can be applied for numerous work whether it's numerical calculations or not. There are unlimited opportunities. I'm a frequent excel user but prefer to do my calculation in C based languages. Though what I don't like in excel is the kind of "dark marketing actions" meaning that, every new version has its own new feature added which could easily be added in previous ones too. For example, there are some kind of statistical distribution functions in excel 2007, and in 2010 inverses of discrete distributions have been added which could easily be added in 2007 too. It'd be better to make every new excel version better in terms of other features rather than adding formulas which required 5 more minutes to have been added in 2007 too.