My opposition proposed (after some "weeding out") that there is a distinction between Excel, the application, the GUI and Excel, the language (which we eventually agreed (I think) manifested itself as a .xls file). Similarly, VB is both a language and a development environment and referring to VB is a potential ambiguity. I disagree with this analogy on the grounds that the very definition of Excel (proposed by Microsoft) makes no distinction. Further, it is impossible to draw a boundary around one and not the other.
without commenting on excel, i believe this separation of development environment and language is outdated. development environments are no good unless they are intimately aware of the language and language designers should keep development environments in mind. language designs get too complicated if they try to cover issues that are better handled in the development environment, and such environments are much easier to create for languages supportive of such efforts. recent trends in semantics-aware ides highlight one side of the association, and of course, there are the ancient lisp and smalltalk, where the languages not only ease tool development, but trying to understand smalltalk as a notation only, rather than an image-based language/environment, is really missing half the point. claus