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The SAS vs. R Debate

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Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#21

Post by robertk »

jzwinck wrote: post #9

The article says this particular instance of the debate started in 2011. Things have shifted a little since then, and I think Python has won more mindshare with Pandas, SciPy, NumPy, and all the rest. I've used both Python and R, and think the next debate will be between those two, as people find that R is not a very good programming language and lacks decent libraries for things like web scraping. Python can be a si…

What are you talking about? R has some of the most robust debugging tools I have encountered. You should look into the functions: browser, traceback, recover, trace, dump.frames, debug, debugonce, `environmentIf you're unsatisfied with R's debugging tools, you are probably not familiar with them:

http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Exceptions-Debugging.html

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#22

Post by robertk »

jzwinck wrote: post #9

The article says this particular instance of the debate started in 2011. Things have shifted a little since then, and I think Python has won more mindshare with Pandas, SciPy, NumPy, and all the rest. I've used both Python and R, and think the next debate will be between those two, as people find that R is not a very good programming language and lacks decent libraries for things like web scraping. Python can be a si…

Disagree. I've had an R server running in production for real-time analytics under heavy load in the last six months, and I have had exactly zero problems. Literally no down time.

Additionally, weak scraping support is a myth: http://www.theswarmlab.com/r-vs-python-round-2-22/

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#23

Post by jofer »

mjfl wrote: post #20
krick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> R right now still wins in the number of algorithms implemented in it Can you please list some important tools implemented in R but not in Python? I'd like to know how bit the gap is.

Is there an equivalent Python package to R's {stats}? http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/00...

Have a look at statsmodels: http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net/ and for more basic things, scipy.stats: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html

It's not a one-to-one match, but the majority of the functionality is there.

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#24

Post by reeses »

ropz wrote: post #13

These people: http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/ produce a compiler, tools etc that run the language of SAS. (disclaimer: I interviewed there last year)

That's awesome. Can you tell us anything about how close they have come and how they've avoided SAS's competitive litigation? :)

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#25

Post by ropz »

reeses wrote: post #24
ropz wrote: post #13

These people: http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/ produce a compiler, tools etc that run the language of SAS. (disclaimer: I interviewed there last year)

That's awesome. Can you tell us anything about how close they have come and how they've avoided SAS's competitive litigation? :)

Nope, I don't work there.

Suggest you ask them :)

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#26

Post by christopheraden »

pistolpete20 wrote: post #17

I used to work for one of the largest U.S insurance companies. They were always behind in transitioning to new technology (Excel 2003 could be found there in 2013). That being said, the entire staistical modeling team and research department made the switch to R and Python. Only a few clung to SAS but realized they would be forced to move to R as any collabration would need to be converted to R and not to SAS. I beli…

I work in big insurance, too. How did you handle porting your legacy code into (R|Python)?

We had tens of thousands of lines of SAS code from over the course of 10 years (macros, clinical programs, reporting functionality) of SAS programming that the higher-ups never saw the benefit of switching to Python or R to be feasible, especially with the Biostats team working on existing projects.

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#27

Post by dataminded »

reeses wrote: post #24
ropz wrote: post #13

These people: http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/ produce a compiler, tools etc that run the language of SAS. (disclaimer: I interviewed there last year)

That's awesome. Can you tell us anything about how close they have come and how they've avoided SAS's competitive litigation? :)

They have been sued and a very interesting ruling came out of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc._v_World_Prog...

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#28

Post by JasonCEC »

My company uses R, Shiny, and Rserve for nearly everything. R is a great programing language - if you need to quickly and efficiently develop stat's based features for medium sized data.

R excels (get it?) at creating reproducible, fault tolerant, consistent functions that can be automated, packaged, applied to a variety of data types, and then extended later.

Our web-stack is Shiny on AWS and we call our API's built in R (ML, images, data, etc) from Android using Rserve.

A lot of the (programing?) criticisms of R will be 'solved' or become non-issues in the next few years. Multithreading, implicit vectorization, better memory handling, gpu functions, among other things are all in the pipe :) (That said, the syntax _is_ a little weird to get use to)

-----

* We're hiring for very senior positions in data-science and more general R programers. Contact me if you're interested (JasonCEC [at] Gastrograph.com)

[edited for spelling]

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#29

Post by opensandwich »

Since SAS is a relatively simple language, why can't someone just write a transcompiler that supports a subset of SAS and move it to R? That way you have the best of both worlds (sort of).

The most difficult thing about that is how you would treat "by" statements (SAS) vs the split-apply-combine (R).

Self-plug: I sort of made a quick hack about a month ago for SAS-Python, I'm sure someone with more programming experience than me could produce something much better (I come from a maths background).

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/chappers/8747253/stan_examp... https://github.com/chappers/Stan

Re: The SAS vs. R Debate

#30

Post by Fomite »

krick wrote: post #18
jzwinck wrote: post #9

The article says this particular instance of the debate started in 2011. Things have shifted a little since then, and I think Python has won more mindshare with Pandas, SciPy, NumPy, and all the rest. I've used both Python and R, and think the next debate will be between those two, as people find that R is not a very good programming language and lacks decent libraries for things like web scraping. Python can be a si…

> R right now still wins in the number of algorithms implemented in it Can you please list some important tools implemented in R but not in Python? I'd like to know how bit the gap is.

I think the biggest problem is for most of my statistical work, for Python I'd have to check, for R I can safely simply assume an implementation (or several) exists.
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