Inefficiency of SAS Programming

My apologies, this obviously doubles as my "for registration purposes"
account and so I don't often send from it - I was not intentionally being so
secretive : )

At any rate, I completely agree, but of course it's a reciprocal
relationship. ?The software is written in SAS because that's what the
organizations use, the organizations use SAS because that's what the
programs are written in... ?For better or worse, SAS's integration in big
bureaucracies is the main thing that keeps it competitive in the marketplace
and viable. ?There aren't a lot of other contexts in which their pricing
structure would work.

Bryan

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Frank E Harrell Jr <
f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:

spam me wrote:

I've actually used AHRQ's software to create Inpatient Quality Indicator
reports. ?I can confirm pretty much what we already know; it is
inefficient.
Running on about 1.8 - 2 million cases, it would take just about a whole
day
to run the entire process from start to finish. ?That isn't all processing
time and includes some time for the analyst to check results between
substeps, but I still knew that my day was full when I was working on IQI
reports.



To be fair though, there are a lot of other factors (beside efficiency
considerations) that go into AHRQ's program design. ?First, there are a
lot
of changes to that software every year. ?In some cases it is easier and
less
error prone to hardcode a few points in the data so that it is blatantly
obvious what to change next year should another analyst need to do so.
?Second,
the organizations that use this software often require transparency and
may
not have high level programmers on staff. ?Writing code so that it is
accessible, editable, and interpretable by intermediate level programmers
or
analysts is a plus. ?Third, given that IQI reports are often produced on a
yearly basis, there's no real need to sacrifice clarity, etc. for
efficiency
- you're only doing this process once a year.



There are other points that could be made, but the main idea is I don't
think it's fair to hold this software up, out of context, as an example of
SAS's (or even AHRQs) inefficiencies. ?I agree that SAS syntax is nowhere
near as elegant or as powerful as R from a programming standpoint, that's
why after 7 years of using SAS I switched to R. ?But comparing the two at
that level is like a racing a Ferrari and a Bentley to see which is the
better car.

Dear Anonymous,

Nice points. ?I would just add that it would be better if
government-sponsored projects would result in software that could be run
without expensive licenses.

Thanks
Frank

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--
Frank E Harrell Jr ? Professor and Chair ? ? ? ? ? School of Medicine
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Department of Biostatistics ? Vanderbilt University

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