In my business I need to work with SAS. So let me offer some personal opinions what it really is. It's one of those things where I fail to understand why corpor

In my business I need to work with SAS. So let me offer some personal opinions what it really is. It's one of those things where I fail to understand why corporates still choose to spend money on. As a "programing language" it's ridiculously easy to recreate with simple (though occasionally inconsistent) C like syntax. It is sold as a statistical analysis framework. While it can do regression fine, you have to pay additional money to get features like support for decision trees, and still it does not support the proven machine learning techniques (Random Forest, SVMs). I think SAS is a dinosaur existing because of its legacy hold, trying to desperately grab the last straws - like these lawsuits, and writing disparaging papers comparing SAS with free alternatives like MapReduce & R.