I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD.
If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.
Having worked with some VBA myself, this sounds like a very, very, scary statement.
Apparently a reference to Former Duke Cancer Researcher Anil Potti. [1][2]
> …put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...
Likely referring to the Reinhart/Rogoff spreadsheet error discovered by Thomas Herndon. [3]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/13/anil-potti-duke-can...
[3] http://chronicle.com/article/UMass-Graduate-Student-Talks/13...
That something is powerful enough to do the job does not mean that it is a good tool to do the job.
Of course the particular use case I mentioned was probably pushing Excel right to the edge of the envelope and the company was actively developing a .NET replacement for it because everyone recognized this. I have no idea how that turned out but I can say that the Excel system was very impressive and very functional.