3 ms·

Depends what you are familiar with. Once you learn tidyverse in R, you won’t want to go back to SAS. But initially, if you have say 20 years of SAS, then yea,

Depends what you are familiar with. Once you learn tidyverse in R, you won’t want to go back to SAS. But initially, if you have say 20 years of SAS, then yea, SAS will be easier for you and it may or may not be worth switching to R.

devereaux 9y ago
I have not that much experience with SAS. I first played with it for 6 months several years ago, then again for 3 months a few years ago in very specific jobs (what fun it is to be cleaning data with a pure SAS proc instead of using perl - ouch!) I have spent much more time with R, but this class is taught with SAS and it objectively shows some advantages that SAS still has today - in the case I was talking about, if you don't want just a log rank test but something more exotic without writing any code, SAS just has it. Considering how SAS refuses to die, it is interesting to learn with it, before finding a way to do the same in R, as I am likely to encounter some SAS code again! But in a few weeks, I plan to recode all the examples I see in pure R.
- arkades 9y ago
  Ugh, I hate SAS. So much of your time spent on SAS is spent on exactly that: the idiosyncracies of SAS (why is input labeled "cards", professor? Oh, because folks have been working on SAS in one way or another since data was still using punch cards...). R does take more work, but at least it's with generalizable skills. I detest spending my time learning something that can only be used in its narrow niche.
  - devereaux 9y ago
    Alternatively, narrow niches offer many other possibilities for selling skills :-)
    - arkades 9y ago
      Fair, but I think "statistician with a strong general programming bsckground" is actually less common than "statistician with a strong SAS background." Its narrow, but common in that niche.
      - devereaux 9y ago
        Indeed! BTW I just submitted a link to show HN how I include SAS code inside Rstudio. It is a bit ugly but it does the job. If you still need to do some SAS it could be helpful to you.

devereaux 9y ago

I have not that much experience with SAS. I first played with it for 6 months several years ago, then again for 3 months a few years ago in very specific jobs (what fun it is to be cleaning data with a pure SAS proc instead of using perl - ouch!) I have spent much more time with R, but this class is taught with SAS and it objectively shows some advantages that SAS still has today - in the case I was talking about, if you don't want just a log rank test but something more exotic without writing any code, SAS just has it. Considering how SAS refuses to die, it is interesting to learn with it, before finding a way to do the same in R, as I am likely to encounter some SAS code again! But in a few weeks, I plan to recode all the examples I see in pure R.

arkades 9y ago
Ugh, I hate SAS. So much of your time spent on SAS is spent on exactly that: the idiosyncracies of SAS (why is input labeled "cards", professor? Oh, because folks have been working on SAS in one way or another since data was still using punch cards...). R does take more work, but at least it's with generalizable skills. I detest spending my time learning something that can only be used in its narrow niche.
- devereaux 9y ago
  Alternatively, narrow niches offer many other possibilities for selling skills :-)
  - arkades 9y ago
    Fair, but I think "statistician with a strong general programming bsckground" is actually less common than "statistician with a strong SAS background." Its narrow, but common in that niche.
    - devereaux 9y ago
      Indeed! BTW I just submitted a link to show HN how I include SAS code inside Rstudio. It is a bit ugly but it does the job. If you still need to do some SAS it could be helpful to you.