I'd venture out and guess that Excel is probably the most widely used programming environment in the world. Excel macros are a type of programming language, an

I'd venture out and guess that Excel is probably the most widely used programming environment in the world. Excel macros are a type of programming language, and there are many businesses that rely on complex Excel spreadsheets as part of their operations. The fact that these are called macros and not a programming language might be a reason why they are so heavily adopted: to avoid scaring people away from using Excel. This reminds me of an observation from Richard Stallman's speech about Emacs (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html), where secretaries used Emacs Lisp to extend the editor. In a personal computing world that has a sharp distinction between "user" and "programmer," Excel is one of those exceptions where the distinction between "user" and "programmer" is blurred, since you need to use macros to take advantage of Excel's power. Excel macros are the gateway to learning Visual Basic for Applications, a full-fledged embedded programming language. Then once you know VBA, then the road to learning other programming languages such as JavaScript and Python becomes easier.