I frequently use a couple of custom tools I created in Excel (for ease of data entry) to generate and maintain complex state machines and even-driven loop callb

I frequently use a couple of custom tools I created in Excel (for ease of data entry) to generate and maintain complex state machines and even-driven loop callback C code in embedded systems. That does not mean that the embedded systems were written in Excel. In this case Excel is simply leveraged as a productivity tool as I suspect might be the case for the use of Python scripts to generate chunks of code in the JPL case.