I said this a while ago on a deeply nested thread, but I think people miss a critical part of why Excel is popular. It's not that it's a good programming language (the calc language in Excel is pretty bad, though the reactive programming model is nice) it's that it's an amazing debugger. Excel makes it trivial to visually inspect every variable (which it calls a cell). You can debug expressions (which are automatically updated) in exactly the same programmer model as the real expressions. You can create debugging views that mirror some important variables, without learning a different tool.

Build a debugger as nice as Excel and anyone can learn your language.