
SAS is on the brink of something - gk1
https://thomaswdinsmore.com/2018/03/07/sas-is-on-the-brink-of-something/
======
jl6
I’m a lead architect at a major financial services organization in Europe.
We’ve just completed a large SAS upgrade project. While we had no interest in
SAS Viya, SAS legacy remains an important part of our landscape.

It’s not a tool for programmers. It’s a toolbox for people doing other jobs,
who happen to know how to program.

Would we invest in SAS if we were starting today from scratch? No.

But none of SAS’s biggest customers are starting from scratch, and things like
continuity, risk, and embedded institutional expertise are incredibly
important to these customers, in a way that might not be obvious if you’re
coming from the fast-paced world of startups who have the luxury of starting
with nothing.

In the endgame though, I can’t see how SAS will be able to resist the cost
pressure coming from the Python/R/Hadoop/FOSS-in-general ecosystem, as those
tools continue to mature.

Even COBOL will die one day.

~~~
gaius
_Even COBOL will die one day._

The specific syntax of COBOL maybe, but the concept of a COmmon Business
Oriented Language lives on in Java

------
mr_toad
SAS have shown some _belated_ movement towards a more modern architecture. You
can install SAS servers using a package management system, and automate the
process using Ansible.

But their licensing model is straight out of the 90’s. there’s no point using
automated load balancing if your license costs are a fixed multi-million
dollar per year cost.

They have moved to a web-based client. It’s great that it’s not stuck on
Windows. But it’s a very closed client in that it only works with SAS
products. As the article says, no Python or R. And as a web based IDE it’s a
pale shadow of the likes of Cloud 9.

If’s disheartening (but not surprising) to hear a SAS employee say they don’t
care about the core language any more, they make most of their money from BI
tools aimed at non-programmers.

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meuk
Nitpicking: Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't know what SAS is. I have learned to
always introduce abbreviations before using them. I think more people should
do this.

~~~
trollsund
I fully agree. To me, SAS is either an airline company or british special
forces, so I have no idea which company this blogpost is about - and I'm not
going to start researching to find out which company a blog post about a
company is talking about.

However, to be somewhat of a hypocrite, I don't mind abbreviations for broadly
known terms, such as SaaS, DevOps or db. I guess it boils down to the context.

~~~
meuk
> However, to be somewhat of a hypocrite, I don't mind abbreviations for
> broadly known terms, such as SaaS, DevOps or db. I guess it boils down to
> the context.

Well, at least SaaS and DevOps are easily googleable. Still, in any type of
written article, I would just take the time to write out the abbreviated thing
in full the first time. Takes maybe 2 seconds and 10 letters more, and you
won't have people like me complaining :)

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roystonvassey
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.

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Macuyiko
About a year ago, a sales guy from SAS came to give a talk about Viya at our
uni. They even brought a data scientist (whom I believe was actually a smart
kid and feeling uneasy about being dragged into a sales pitch). Traditionally,
SAS has pushed a lot of resources in the educational sector. Get them started
young, and they'll be customers forever.

So anyway, the presentation includes showing off a Jupyter notebook and
showing how you can easily use pandas to load in your data set, build a model
(with Viya), and plot the results with matplotlib. Standard data science
stuff, but distributed automagically thanks to Viya.

During the QA, I asked the following questions:

\- So you are basically attempting the same as what Spark has done, and are
just using R/Python/... as a client? Yes, but we're way more powerful,
manageable, etc...

\- Can I see the source code of your models, or build new ones myself? No...
well maybe, you can write them in SAS base and call them.

\- Can I at least export the model to something like PMML? Oh yes you can
export (shows this off)... to SAS base code.

\- Do you have GPU support for those fancy convolutional neural networks? No
(although I've heard this has changed, though I would still put my trust more
towards Tensorflow or Pytorch).

It kind of seems like a last attempt to get some new lock-in going. Even
Apple's re-open sourcing of turi
([https://github.com/apple/turicreate](https://github.com/apple/turicreate))
is more honest (and more powerful, actually).

I like SAS, they have some very smart people working there and some great
consultants (PhD's, often), but there's too much sales going on. This is what
killed IBM as well.

~~~
fwn
> Traditionally, SAS has pushed a lot of resources in the educational sector.
> Get them started young, and they'll be customers forever.

If that is the strategy I'm not entirely sure it is well implemented. The
version available for windows using students requires running a virtualized
linux in the background to access a browser based, sluggish IDE like
interface.

Compared to SAS, R and Python look like an usability dream.

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mojoe
Out of the 100 or so data scientists in my division, I know of less than 5
people who still occasionally use SAS. It's all either (decreasingly) R or
(increasingly) Python.

edit: scala with spark is increasing in use as well.

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ninkendo
What’s a SAS

~~~
nn3
Kind of like COBOL, an old-school legacy thing originating from mainframes
that some people still use.

~~~
paloaltokid
Most of the worlds largest enterprises run tons of this legacy cobol mainframe
stuff. They solve really hard problems using this technology and we would be
wise not to be dismissive but instead to learn.

~~~
nn3
Right they do, but they are also all working really hard on their transition
plans away from it. See the original link for concrete data on that.

~~~
paloaltokid
It depends. I work professionally with Fortune 500 companies and for many of
them mainframes are here to stay. It’s true that many of them wish to
modernize and move away from mainframes; but they don’t want to get rid of
them entirely.

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xapata
SAS is dying slowly, but deservedly.

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thriftwy
The airline? Don't know any other users of this TLA.

It's very confusing that you don't get even a basic insight of what the
article is about.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
No, the huge enterprise software suite used for analytics and all other sorts
of stuff.

I also thought the airline first, but most people in USA have not heard of
Scandinavian.

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pzone
I have to work with SAS now and again in my research. I grit my teeth and bear
it.

