doesn't always work. I spent years in Finance, and my first 2 were primarily writing and building spreadsheets to monitor risk, pnl, track drift in pnl, simulate portfolios, etc.
A couple years back my firm put into place a dev environment driven by python, and this was the first time since I was in middle school that I was programming withs something other than VBA or excel. After about 2 months, the same sheets I had been writing for years could be translated into massively simpler and easier to read (and follow, modify, extend) python.
Our problem was primarily driven by the need to keep all the information on one screen (in trading, you usually abhor having to scroll back and forth, as it takes time, and can lead to you searching for something rather than focusing on meaningful information). Of course, I could do all the calculations far to the right, and just do references that would be a mess on the dependency tree, but things seem to break just often enough to where you need to balance debugging on the fly (i.e. making it not impossible to see where your inputs are flowing to and which step they are breaking on). I never found a perfect balance.
Some folks decided to use VBA, but then I have never found it easy to read someone's hacked together VBA code. Python I find much easier, and this probably has to do with the weird inconsistent syntax in VBA.
And I'm well aware we were probably banging with a hammer to chop down a california redwood, but sometimes there is so much momentum in a firm you can't change how things are done (interoperability).