I took a programming for math majors course in college, and the largest challenge for the class was understanding procedural looping to process data sets. Under

I took a programming for math majors course in college, and the largest challenge for the class was understanding procedural looping to process data sets. Understanding a for loop or a while loop really was a hard concept for someone to understand. We didn't cover any real data structures, and everything was a 2 dimensional array. Excel, and most spreadsheets for that, avoid some of the basic control structures beginners find challenging. Many functions are basically map and reduce functions so you typically are getting the same number of cells back, or one. Often maps are done visually in the spreadsheet with a formula being applied to every cell in a column.