Please comment on how realistic this is given that SAS is supposedly in overall decline:
https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2024/09/13/sas-programming-language/
6 replies (most recent on top)
Any claim that SAS is anywhere near the top of the list for jobs is absolute bullsh-t.
A quick check on LinkedIn Jobs shows mainstream languages like Python, Java and C++ have hundreds of thousands of jobs listed in the US and SAS has just 499 (as of a few seconds ago).
Even COBOL has far more jobs than SAS (over 4000).
I like CH, he's a nice guy, but his blog post is not grounded in reality.
Here’s an interesting quote from the rstats article linked previously
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Seven of the 14 fastest-growing packages are GUI front-ends that make R easy to use. BlueSky’s actual percent growth was 2,960%, which I recoded as 220% as the original value made the rest of the plot unreadable. In 2022 the company released a Mac version, and the Mayo Clinic announced its migration from JMP to BlueSky
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The #5 ranking appears to be an outlier; SAS does not rank so highly on other lists. But CH is doing his job well to publicize it.
Bob Muenchen provides a detailed analysis of languages and products specifically for data science. He ranks SAS #9 in job postings, behind SQL, Python, Java, C/C++/C#, Tableau, ApacheSpark, MicrosoftPowerBI, and R.
More important than the rank is the direction of change. It's been a booming market, so almost every product and language has been growing. Figure 1d shows a comparison.
https://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/
(Cont.)
It would be difficult to down right impossible to use SAS to program most of the systems and applications written in Go or Rust. These languages, their libraries and respective ecosystems mostly function in a different problem domains than SAS.
SAS has multiple programming languages, the Data Step being the principal historical one. SAS also has a giant ecosystem — a customer often must purchase multiple product modules to realize the full benefits of this. However, SAS is not optimal for the vast majority of things written in Go or Rust and certainly many things written in Python.
The “money quote” from the SAS blogs is this”
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As a long-time developer and technologist, my news feed always lights up when tech media outlets release their annual "Top Programming Languages" lists. Examples include the annual TIOBE Index, StackOverflow Developer Survey and the IEEE Spectrum list. "SAS" always appears on these lists as a programming language, although historically it scores a middling ranking for reasons I'll describe in just a bit.
However, the 2024 IEEE Spectrum "Top Programming Languages" list recently placed SAS at the #5 position when the ranking is weighted for "job opportunities".
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Is IEEE Spectrum really saying that SAS ranks #5 above all programming languages when job opportunities are factored in? That seems dubious if historical SAS programming is in decline with corresponding drops in annual license renewals, and therefore SAS Company revenue.
Even in today’s rocky Tech job market, a #5 ranking would indicate a bounty of open SAS programming jobs. Is this really the case?
The question of “ Is SAS a programming language?” is irrelevant. These days, and maybe for all history, a language isn’t just a syntax but an entire ecosystem. Witness Go, Rust, and Python, to name a few.