Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title

It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?

I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.

Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.

When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.

It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.