Spreadsheets and Engineering (Score 2, Insightful)

I normally lurk, but need to say that I don't think spreadsheets are inherently evil. I am an engineer at a large oil company, and we use spreadsheet models for a number of processes. Typically the spreadsheet is used as an interface, since everyone is familiar with it. The "number crunching" is done with VBA. I know that among the readership of /. VBA is a dirty word. For an engineer, though, it is not that bad of a tool. Not particularly fast, but for simple, numeric algorithm implementations it works fine. Sure - we can and do use purpose-built models. They have their place. However, they tend to be black boxes that can't be easily modified. They also tend to be really, really, really expensive and more of a solution than you need. In other words, for some problems, they tend not be the most cost-effective means for computation. If transparency of the calculation method is most important and not millisecond execution speed, then I agree with a previous poster who argued that Excel and VBA tend to be "open source" in the context of "how the calculation was done".