I used SAS and SPSS in Statistics and both my college economics classes in the 80’s. Very powerful languages.
Are they still considered the gold standard for statistics?
They still using it in Macroeconomics class and Macroeconomics classes?
SAS is kind of the Android of the modern computing world; R is the Apple. There are other more specific applied tools, but those are the two big ones.
Bwhuh? R, the free and open source programming language, with a massive collection of free and opens source packages, is like Apple? I’m slightly confused.
Unless you’re maybe thinking about how ggplot2 is one of the few data visualization systems that gives a fuck about good design.
Anyhow, in my little corner of science R is becoming more and more common, and is dominant among people who care enough about stats to stop using excel. Publications with new statistical methods frequently come with R packages.
All the cool kids are learning R. In my circle of data geeks, you’re kinda screwed if you don’t know R.
I’d say that SAS is still the standard though. In my biz, you want something you can to take to court, if it comes to that, and SAS provides that. Many R packages have been properly peer reviewed and vetted, and I definitely trust all the base packages. But you’re taking your chances with the more esoteric geeky stuff.
If you intend on working for the cheap-ass public sector, I’d recommend learning R.
Yes.
SPSS, MATLAB, R. I never used SAS and don’t know anybody who does but I’m not in anything-economics.
Yeah, R is the Linux if anything. Although R, Apple, and Linux users have all attempted to evangelize me in the past, unlike say Android, so they have that in common.
Bwhuh? In the sense that R is the cool, shiny thing (pun intended) with its advocacy starting among the young’uns, and SAS is the staid old-school standby. R has typically only been good for small to moderate sized data sets, but the commercialized version Revolution R runs on Linux servers and can process larger data (it is however far behind on the statistical packages the open source version has). Revo R was also purchased by Microsoft this year, so who knows what that means.
A lot of people still use SAS to manipulate and process large data sets before putting them into R, so there’s that.
Bwhuh? You do realize that iOS is almost 15 months older than Android, and is yelling for that damn kid to get off its lawn?
Fine, substitute whatever analogy works for dewy-eyed evangelism of a newer, innovative product. My point was that people really get enthusiastic about R and will occasionally proselytize about it.
So yeah, maybe Linux, except more popular and a better product.
R seems to be the hip thing around here.
Fair enough. I just associate Apple with people who care about fashion far more than utility (which isn’t entirely fair I realize), and with its walled garden of very carefully controlled proprietary software. But that’s a flame war for another thread.
About R being the “hip new thing”, I have to admit that I’ll take your science a bit more seriously if you show good R/ggplot2 plots than if you put up terrible default Excel plots. Meanwhile, SAS and SPSS plots are perfectly cromulent but sometimes look a little dated.
So today R is to SAS what SAS was to COBOL back when I started using SAS in 1985?
I work in big pharma, and SAS is still used a lot. For government filings, it is a must. The FDA does not want to try to figure out what the R code is really doing, especially when it is changing so fast. We also use a ton of other packages, including R, SAS JMP, Statistica, and a bevy of other more esoteric packages.
We still teach SPSS here. Licensing is a pain in the ass, too.
I work in higher ed, and we teach both SAS and SPSS for a variety of areas (Econ, sociology, et ).
Government contractor here. We use SAS, because that’s what the gov’t wants and what all our partners use.