[jrcii]

Excel is not perfect but it is best in class. I've built and maintained a time-series statistics research database for one of the largest trade associations in the world for over 10 years which heavily integrates with Excel. In so doing I've become intimately familiar with its quarks and shortcomings but ultimately it always provides a path to accomplish your goals, including high-performance automation https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/bb687829.asp...

[CompelTechnic]

As a mechanical engineer, excel has been a wonderful tool. Engineers in our department get to have a smooth transition into programming competency in VBA, which has found itself extremely useful in many mechanical engineering analyses.

My coworkers are given the ability to crawl (simple equations in spreadsheets) then walk (user-defined functions) then run (automatic iterative solutions in UDF's, applying test data to create UDF models of machine performance). Not something a lot of mechanical folks would ever find themselves doing unless an already well-used tool has a good progression toward more complex and demanding use cases.

[psykovsky]

you seem to be talking about php...

[thrownear]

Php is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title.

[gelasio]

iOS and OS X were the first things that came to my mind.