A few years back, I was an out-and-out SAS guy. This was mainly because the company I worked for had everything in SAS. Then, our company acquired a competitor

A few years back, I was an out-and-out SAS guy. This was mainly because the company I worked for had everything in SAS. Then, our company acquired a competitor to SAS; SAS was booted out and literally, overnight, we were asked to stop using SAS and switch over. Thanks to this development, my team and I scrambled to port it over to the new tool. Of course, the transition wasn't smooth and a lot of our programs couldn't be migrated. This is when I began exploring Python and fell in love with it. I rediscovered programming, powerful ML libraries and the awesomeness of the open-source paradigm. I end my random anecdote to say that I'm grateful for this (unexpected) development that helped me accelerate my career in data science, which would have definitely not happened if the abrupt removal of SAS hadn't taken place. I would've most likely still be churning regular dashboards built on legacy SAS code for some bank.