Some people I work with have made very complex Excel "machines" that have been in use by many people for decades. One of the new engineers spent about six months porting one over to MATLAB and there were all kinds of magic numbers in the formulas that turns out were there to account for some bugs in some test equipment we bought 20 years ago. We had purchased a new system that would output data that wasn't compatible with his old model so the new engineer ported it over and now we get clean, consistent results. This is for antenna measurements so there's really been little advances in decades in the fields. The advances only really exist for antenna simulations.