[elcapitan]

There's actually an interesting gap between 'building some model in Excel' and 'moving on into a programming model where code and data are separated'. Like generating model code in some normal programming language from a spreadsheet.

[eterm]

Does VBA fill that gap? I once worked on a system where one of the more important parts of the business was a system of VBA modules in an access file.

One of my more important contributions as a fresh graduate entering the workplace was to get people to copy the file from the network share to a local drive before running. Run-times went from "leave overnight" to ~15 minutes.

[tamana]

Right, but why VBA? Because VBA is the only language with first class support in Excel, not because VBA is good at all. If not fon its "privilege", you'd use something like Python or JavaScript (yah it sucks, but not as bad a VB) or a purpose-built sane language, not something Joel Spolsky dashed off a spec for one Tuesday afternoon.