After a bit of thought, I acknowledge that you could conceive of a new language with better syntax that had the modern bells and whistles with the added capacit

After a bit of thought, I acknowledge that you could conceive of a new language with better syntax that had the modern bells and whistles with the added capacity to view spreadsheets and their cells as a standard data type and with one of the target output windows being a standard Excel spreadsheet. I am not sure that you would then want to compile that down to VBA though - that would be rather "downhill" after all of the effort developing new tools. This http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ was an attempt to start again from a language perspective (Python here) but I suspect you are looking for something that would just drop in alongside the ubiquitous Excel without making the less technical user aware of the difference.