SAS makes me crazy

SAS is the big dog of statistical programs. It suffers your interaction through an almost nonsensical coding language, and it makes my brain hurt.

I'm a fair coder. I can code sloppy object oriented code and I'm comfortable with arrays, functions, objects, the whole bit. I've learned on my own, but I'm not a monkey.

SAS drives me up a freaking wall. As far as I remember (and I'm not going to back this up with research because, well frankly, I'm a blogger) some guy, perhaps Samuel Alphonse Sassafras, started building SAS on his abacus a million years ago - before object-oriented-code became popular, and no one has seen fit to go back and, you know, make it easy to use since.

It's so bad that, despite being a language designed specifically for manipulating and analyzing data, they eventually imported a much better language for data manipulation rather than doing it right themselves (big shout out to all the Proc SQL heads in the crowd!).

Anyway, I spent all of last night doing dull, impossible crap like trying to read in date values and split rows of data into multiple rows.

I'm glad to have SAS around for when I get to doing logistic regressions, but it's driving me up a bleeding wall right now!