Date:         Fri, 4 Apr 2003 14:20:01 -0500
Reply-To:     Bob Burnham <robert.a.burnham@DARTMOUTH.EDU>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Bob Burnham <robert.a.burnham@DARTMOUTH.EDU>
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
Subject:      Re: S.O.S. (Save Our SAS)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

ssprice@cox-internet.com (Save Our SAS) writes:

  +----------------------------------------------------------------
  | (2) SAS is too expensive to use as a general purpose programming
  | language - we should use (for example) COBOL, C, Java,
  | etc. instead.
  +----------------------------------------------------------------

Just my two cents (since I've lurked without posting for many
months) but I don't think you can win any arguments with the
people that you are up against.  They've come to the conclusion
that programming languages are commodity goods and that you
should just be able to grab any one off the shelf for your
purposes.  What they don't understand is that languages don't
often differ on what they make possible, but what they make easy
(to paraphrase Larry Wall).

The bottom line is that SAS makes a lot of things easy and that,
in business, you don't always know ahead of time what the value
of that is going to be.  Quick example: I was working for a
large financial services firm when an outside investment advisor
called with the following ultimatum, "I just spent a HUGE amount
of money on some new client management software and now I find
out that it isn't compatible with all of the different data
feeds that I'm getting.  I'm going to transfer a VAST amount of
money to the first company that can get me the data that I
need."  I was assigned to the job as the programmer along with
another very experienced person who worked as a business analyst
translating all of the business logic into terms that I could
understand.  To get this to work we ended up calling everything
in the SAS manual and I ended up spending hours talking to SAS
tech support who worked tirelessly with me to get everything
working.  The happy ending, of course, is that the client was
thrilled and we ended up taking in a lot of new assets which
made everybody happy.

The morals of the story: [1] I could never have predicted which
features of SAS were going to be the most useful to me during
those Mountain Dew powered moments at 2AM, and [2] you can never
underestimate the value of having the folks of SAS tech support
working on your problems and helping you to get things done.

If the writing is on the wall that SAS is indeed heading out the
door at least lobby hard for the replacement language that you
are most interested in learning.  Oh, and definitely read The
Prince as David suggested. . . :>)

Viva Elvis.

--
Bob Burnham
bburnham@dartmouth.edu
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~bburnham