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I think the article misses an important point: SAS is a generational thing, and the influence of generation that cut their teeth on SAS and VAX mainframes in th

I think the article misses an important point: SAS is a generational thing, and the influence of generation that cut their teeth on SAS and VAX mainframes in the 1980s is waning. There's a reason why the SAS ads you see in the airports are all targeted at management--because that's where all those people work now. And soon they will retire. They would never dare advertise to the poor analysts who are forced to actually use SAS to get work done, because we know what turd it is. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that not a single up-and-coming statistician in this day and age chooses expensive, obfuscated SAS as the language with which to hone their skills. It is truly the worst language I have ever had the misfortune of being forced to learn (by an old professor, who knew SAS and refused to learn anything else.) Somebody back me up here. There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing better than other off-the-shelf solutions. That feature gap will close over time as R and other open tools rise in popularity. And there will always be a niche market for SAS programmers because many companies have huge libraries of SAS code which run their credit card/oil rig/whatever analytics, and starting from scratch is not an option. But SAS's dominance is unquestionably on the decline, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that next generation a) isn't being trained on SAS and b) doesn't want to be.

physcab 17y ago
I haven't seen SAS code before. I'll take your word that it's ugly. However, if SAS can adopt new standards, I hardly see them waning. Companies will always be thirsty for better ways to understand their customers, and now with the ease at which new internet companies are started and more people become connected, the demand for those services is only going to increase. If SAS can continue to outperform by investing in R&D and adopt new ways to bring in fresh talent (ie use more open-source tools) to keep them ahead of the curve, they'll do just fine.
- zzleeper 17y ago
  It's not ugly. It's hideous. I use Stata (commercial) and R (free), and both have a much better language. The only reason why people I know use SAS is to deal with very-big datasets directly, instead of having to partition the data by hand.
  - earl 17y ago
    To be fair, SAS for stats has been dead for a decade. Their "state of the art" lags R by at least that much...
10ren 17y ago
> The company shifted course earlier this year and modified its software so programs written with R work seamlessly with SAS technology. I agree that getting them while they're young - like McDonalds - is an effective strategy, but if you can swap out the language for another front-end, does it matter? (it's a big "if").
jimbokun 17y ago
"There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing better than other off-the-shelf solutions." Those also seem, to me, the only areas where you can justify significant profit margins for your product.
bayareaguy 17y ago
There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing So is their real competition Hadoop and the other Map/Reduce frameworks?
- earl 17y ago
  Yeah. It used to be that SAS, like Oracle, was the only place to turn to when you had very large quantity of data. The internet has added multiple orders of magnitude to large, and people now use MR frameworks.

physcab 17y ago

I haven't seen SAS code before. I'll take your word that it's ugly. However, if SAS can adopt new standards, I hardly see them waning. Companies will always be thirsty for better ways to understand their customers, and now with the ease at which new internet companies are started and more people become connected, the demand for those services is only going to increase. If SAS can continue to outperform by investing in R&D and adopt new ways to bring in fresh talent (ie use more open-source tools) to keep them ahead of the curve, they'll do just fine.

zzleeper 17y ago
It's not ugly. It's hideous. I use Stata (commercial) and R (free), and both have a much better language. The only reason why people I know use SAS is to deal with very-big datasets directly, instead of having to partition the data by hand.
- earl 17y ago
  To be fair, SAS for stats has been dead for a decade. Their "state of the art" lags R by at least that much...

10ren 17y ago

> The company shifted course earlier this year and modified its software so programs written with R work seamlessly with SAS technology. I agree that getting them while they're young - like McDonalds - is an effective strategy, but if you can swap out the language for another front-end, does it matter? (it's a big "if").

jimbokun 17y ago

"There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing better than other off-the-shelf solutions." Those also seem, to me, the only areas where you can justify significant profit margins for your product.

bayareaguy 17y ago

There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing So is their real competition Hadoop and the other Map/Reduce frameworks?

earl 17y ago
Yeah. It used to be that SAS, like Oracle, was the only place to turn to when you had very large quantity of data. The internet has added multiple orders of magnitude to large, and people now use MR frameworks.