[auxym]

I can assure you that most "traditional" engineering (thinking mostly mechanical and civil) calculations, for things you use daily, were done in excel. Anything that would be a pit too much of pain to manually bang out on a calculator, but that doesn't really require complex logic (looping etc)? Excel.

Most engineers are more similar to business people in that regards, they see traditional programming languages as too complicated. We learned MATLAB in university, two classes, basic intro to programming and then numerical methods. Many people had to retake the first class at least once.

I'd love to bang out my calculations in IPython Notebooks, but the most important requirement of engineering calculations is that they can be documented and understood by peers. Since none of my peers are interested in learning python, it's useless. Excel is the lowest common denominator, everyone gets it.

I once read this interesting contrast on HN and it stuck with me:

"Traditional programming languages show the program but hide the data. Spreadsheets hide the program but show the data".