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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.

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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?

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