41–50 of 71 posts
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What word do you prefer to 'analytics', if we are talking about taking data and analysing it to extract insights? This does not have to involve machine learning, and "pattern recognition" is an academic term (and might be confusing for laymen).
Why not just "analysis"? Business people seem determined to invent new jargon when our current vocabulary is sufficient.
I'm surprised that the author combines "the C languages" saying that most adverts that mention any of C/C++/C# mention all three. In my experience there is a large difference between companies searching for C# developers and those searching for C/C++. After blurring this distinction he concludes that R and Python are "very different languages" while I consider them to be largely overlapping.
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Also notable that so many new shops are foregoing it entirely. SAS, and its price tag, is a holdover from the days when 'analytics' was an afterthought for companies looking to maximize profit. Now that much less mature companies are realizing the value of 'analytics' (I hate that word) SAS's cost doesn't really make sense.
My company uses SAS extensively a large part of that is legacy (for the same reason we have a heap of Fortan code still). SAS has been in use here since the 80's. I have gone as far as porting some (non performance sensitive). C++ models into SAS because people in my org understand the language better. I don't actually hate SAS and I'm very productive using it but at the same time I do feel that not knowing R limits…
My shop is going the opposite direction, from R/excel to SAS+Cognos. I'm not happy about that decision, but the pay is good and the problems are still interesting.
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Off-topic, but what is a "data engineer"?
I'm sure someone can come along with a better description, but it's kinda like devops/sysadmin but specifically for data storage and access. You could also look it up...
I once worked on a piece of software communicating with a SAS instance (doing live decision management), but everything about it seemed sketchy. No one using it really liked it, and its internals always appeared like a blackbox to me. Also, either it is terribly engineered or the devs working with it were just bad - we wanted a JSON-based REST API, but they said that it's "not possible with SAS", so we fell back to b…
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Another reason why I'm glad python is winning (and a fun read): http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/
Love! "R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers." Yup.
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Agreed. So far in my search, C# leans toward Microsoft shops seeking C#/.NET whereas C/C++ has been companies searching for embedded software roles.
Mostly agree, but I've also seen a fair bit of C/C++ skills associated with jobs involving *nix development environments. I've rarely seen C++ associated with embedded jobs (even though I've read that it can certainly be used if care is taken to avoid things like dynamic dispatch, etc)
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Love! "R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers." Yup.
The first time I tried to read R code I was immediately disgusted with how '.' is a valid variable name character. Not only valid, but inexplicably also in common use.
I once worked on a piece of software communicating with a SAS instance (doing live decision management), but everything about it seemed sketchy. No one using it really liked it, and its internals always appeared like a blackbox to me. Also, either it is terribly engineered or the devs working with it were just bad - we wanted a JSON-based REST API, but they said that it's "not possible with SAS", so we fell back to b…
SAS tech support have been pretty good though I believe my workplace pays a lot for the privilege of being able to contact them direct.
One thing I have found is you can usually throw something together in a pretty "hackish" manner but typically there is a better and more optimal method of doing it which will be much more stable. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to ask tech support "What is the recommended method for doing..." Code which abuses the SAS macro language is especially notorious and a good candiate for asking this.
A quick google tells me first class JSON support is pretty new (dec 2016).
http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2016/12/02/json-libnam...
I don't know much about this all the A2A messaging is XML based in my org.
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Off-topic, but what is a "data engineer"?
I'm sure someone can come along with a better description, but it's kinda like devops/sysadmin but specifically for data storage and access. You could also look it up...