On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 06:54:45 -0800, RolandRB <rolandberry@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>I know this is going to be controversial but I have been put on the >spot about this at interviews and in work situations where a person >wants to become a good sas programmer and wants me to tell them how. >The answer is never easy, I have found. So using some spare time I >wrote a page on this to flesh out my thoughts. > >http://www.datasavantconsulting.com/roland/goodsas.html

hi,

Nicely done! I like the soundness of the advice which just exudes deep sas programming experience Roland has.

About sas being an easy language to pick up, though, I don't agree -- i think it is rather one of the hardest because there are so many mini- languages in sas. Thus sas as a whole is a very big and complex thing to learn. I seriously think it takes years (instead of months) to get over the initial learning curve in sas.

Small and clean languages are easy to learn. So far my favorate has been ML -- which does not even have any "variables" in the conventional sense. Javascript (I mean ECMAScript, not java langauge) is quite nice, but they are in a nasty conflict about the next version http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/02/1748244. Perl is definitely a writer's language -- which can be downright cryptic to read. Python and Ruby are in fact complicated but easy to get started. You can see the influence of Perl/Python/Ruby in the syntax of proc template "language."

Enough about the languages... at the end of the page, Roland says "Those who are technically brilliant tread a lonely road." So, what do you think about the statement, those among you who are technically brilliant?! :-)

cheers, chang