Spreadsheets just work, perhaps so well that they have become victims of their own success. They are such effective tools that they are lumped in with other user facing office productivity software, and as a result they seem to be overlooked by more technical people with programming skills in other languages. I always thought the spreadsheet format could be expanded and improved to be able to handle more use cases and behave more like a normal program, but there has been shockingly little effort put into trying this out. At one point there was something that acted like a spreadsheet where any cell could be a python expression, but I think it's defunct now.

There will be no innovation from Microsoft on this front. We should really decouple the spreadsheet concept from excel the product.