Comment by tinomaxgalvin
5 years ago
So I have been using Excel every day for 13 years as an actuary. I'm also involved in the management of software project in c++.
You are correct. It's a combination of REPL like behaviour and being able to see the entire state at once that does it. Excel is the most agile programming environment known to man.
Completely agree from my actuarial experience too. Do you find in practice though that often Excel is only part of the workflow and that a lot of the agility is lost because it's using output from a (often black box) modelling tool that is doing a lot of the computational heavy lifting?