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Trying to do real programming in SAS is a nightmare. The language sucks. Also, it's proprietary and expensive. It's surprising that statisticians would fail to
by time_management 18y ago
Trying to do real programming in SAS is a nightmare. The language sucks. Also, it's proprietary and expensive.
It's surprising that statisticians would fail to understand the importance of testing, given that a lot of the root issues in statistics (e.g. the Bayesian/frequentist dispute over "what is a probability?") are epistemological.
- trapper 18y agoAgreed entirely. I don't understand why they don't get testing either. Not one I have met realises just how error ridden their scripts probably are. Still, a lot of programmers don't understand the value of testing yet.
- thwarted 18y agoOne of my undergrad classes was for SAS, and they mixed MIS, CS, math, and statistics people in this class. It took weeks for those on the CS track to get that when your code says "proc average", you're _calling_ a procedure, not defining a function. We had no idea where the code was supposed to go. There was a serious disconnect between the students and the professor in that class, who, I later realized would have just needed to say "this calls the procedure average" and things would have been fine. We had no idea, initially, how we were getting results. Of course, we had to run all this on VMS and print it out on a fan-fold line printer, and it wasn't very interactive. SAS products seem to be more visual and interactive now.