R help - Nov 2001 - Are you experienced in SAS and R as well? Which of these would you recommend?

Hello!

Disapointed about SPSS I have to choose another statistic program. And altough I
sympathise with the idea of a non-commercial software-project like R and I like
the spirit of the R community (and of course I am not keen on paying 150$ to SAS
for a one-year students license), I will probably buy SAS, because people I will
work with use SAS and I want a close cooperation with them. Besides I guess that
SAS is still much more powerful than SAS.

But: can ?t you convince me to choose R? I would appreciate that very much,
because my sympathy is with the r-project. Maybe the syntax of both programs is
quite similar, so I will still be able to exchange a lot of experience with my
SAS-using future collegues!? Or I could even convince the newcomers to swap to
R!?

If you know some arguments, I should consider for my decission, I am looking
forward to hear (or read) of you!

Michael


Michael Reinecke
Turnerstr. 3a
49076 Osnabr?ck
Germany
Tel: +49-541-64147
mreineck at uos.de
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20011123/93e030e7/attachment.html

SAS is far behind R and S-Plus in statistical modeling, exploratory data
analysis, and graphics.  You might want to look at my comparison of SAS and
S-Plus in http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat/s/doc/splus.pdf chapter 1.

See other sections of that text to become convinced that the S language is also
superior to SAS for data manipulation (recoding variables, etc.).  SAS is
superior for handling very large datasets.

Frank Harrell


On Fri, 23 Nov 2001 12:31:47 +0100
Michael Reinecke <mreineck at uos.de> wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Disapointed about SPSS I have to choose another statistic program. And
altough I sympathise with the idea of a non-commercial software-project like R
and I like the spirit of the R community (and of course I am not keen on paying
150$ to SAS for a one-year students license), I will probably buy SAS, because
people I will work with use SAS and I want a close cooperation with them.
Besides I guess that SAS is still much more powerful than SAS.
> 
> But: can t you convince me to choose R? I would appreciate that very much,
because my sympathy is with the r-project. Maybe the syntax of both programs is
quite similar, so I will still be able to exchange a lot of experience with my
SAS-using future collegues!? Or I could even convince the newcomers to swap to
R!?
> 
> If you know some arguments, I should consider for my decission, I am
looking forward to hear (or read) of you!
> 
> Michael
> 
> 
> Michael Reinecke
> Turnerstr. 3a
> 49076 Osnabrck
> Germany
> Tel: +49-541-64147
> mreineck at uos.de
> 

-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr              Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics
Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences
U. Virginia School of Medicine  http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._

Michael,

I know something of SAS and a little of R.
I would think the big question is, "what do you intend using it for?"
Both R and SAS are interpreated stats computing languages. R is a great
stats tool  but I don't know about it's data management side where SAS
is v
good at handling large datasets (I'm talking of 1-10M records by 100 vars)
not small stuff of 1000 obs by 5 or 10 vars.

SAS has a lot of built-in procedure that are easy to understand and follow
such as proc means/summary; the relative novice will get to grips with this
fairly quickly and be able to do basic but useful things.  The equivalent
functions in R are the "apply" variants and require a bit of getting
used
to. Also, the editing features in PC-SAS are v. friendly and pleasant to
use. This (in my view) is in contrast to R where I have to use NOTEPAD (in
Windows anyway) to create a text file which is then included into the
console (I find it a bit cumbersome). SAS also has really good
documentation that explains a lot whereas with R you often have to be a bit
more expert.

Where R comes into its own is when things get a bit complicated - there's
lots of packages available on CRAN which do wonderful things that SAS
doesn't. In SAS you'll have to resort to MACROS and IML and even then
the
building blocks won't always be available to you. Yes, SAS has proc's
for
GLM and maximising nonlinear functions etc. which are not to hard to apply
but once you try to get outside the rigid SAS framework life gets difficult
- I once tried to put together a Neural Net with Proc NLIN and eventually
gave up because the of all the messy programming that had to be done -
mabye some day in another life I'll get back to it!

Even though R has great statistical functionality it's main drawback (to me
at any rate) is that most of the underlying code is written in C or
Fortran. Not a problem if you only require to work with R packages as they
stand. But if you want to get your hands dirty chances are you'll have to
hack someone else's C or Fortran code - and I have to say that some of the
Fortran I've seen has been fairly unintelligible. This makes it
particularly hard to make anything but rudimentary changes to the code
which then must be compiled and loaded into your R program.

The last point worth mentioning is that R, as I understand it, is designed
to work on vectors (that's why the "apply" function is so
important). It
doesn't like loops so that any code involving large complex looping
constructs is better written in C or Fortran and loaded in. Loops in SAS on
the other hand don't seem to be too much of an issue.

Anyway I hope this helps. My advice is do what I tend to do - try to get
your dept or company to spend the $150 on SAS and get R free. You'll then
get be able to get answers using both tools. It's a little bit inefficient
but often the insight gained looking at a task from different viewpoints
helps the understanding and final product/output a lot better.

All the best,

Gerard





                    Michael Reinecke
                    <mreineck at uos.de>           To:     r-help at
lists.R-project.org
                    Sent by:                    cc:
                    owner-r-help at stat.ma        Subject:     [R] Are you
experienced in SAS and R as well? Which of
                    th.ethz.ch                  these would you recommend?


                    23/11/01 11:31
                    Please respond to
                    Michael Reinecke






Hello!

Disapointed about SPSS I have to choose another statistic program. And
altough I sympathise with the idea of a non-commercial software-project
like R and I like the spirit of the R community (and of course I am not
keen on paying 150$ to SAS for a one-year students license), I will
probably buy SAS, because people I will work with use SAS and I want a
close cooperation with them. Besides I guess that SAS is still much more
powerful than SAS.

But: can ?t you convince me to choose R? I would appreciate that very much,
because my sympathy is with the r-project. Maybe the syntax of both
programs is quite similar, so I will still be able to exchange a lot of
experience with my SAS-using future collegues!? Or I could even convince
the newcomers to swap to R!?

If you know some arguments, I should consider for my decission, I am
looking forward to hear (or read) of you!

Michael


Michael Reinecke
Turnerstr. 3a
49076 Osnabr?ck
Germany
Tel: +49-541-64147
mreineck at uos.de



The information in this email, and any attachments transmitted with it, are
confidential
and are for the intended recipient only. If you receive this message in error,
please
notify us via postmaster at cso.ie.

To see the latest figures from the CSO go to http://www.cso.ie
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._

Hello,

Here at Purdue, the Statistics department requires that its students 
learn both SAS and S/R.  SAS is a necessary skill for work in industry, 
since most employers use it, and since it handles large data sets well. 
  Unfortunately SAS is terribly awkward to actually DO anything with.  I 
used to program in FORTRAN IV, and the SAS data step reminds me of that, 
only it seems a good deal worse.

A little over a year ago I had to work with a large data set from a 
credit bureau.  It was close to a gigabyte, and I found that SAS could 
open the data and do things with it, even on a little laptop with only 
144MB of ram.  I used SAS to pick out several random samples of 10,000 
observations, and worked on them with R.  R is wonderfully flexible, and 
I was able to do some exploratory stuff that I just wouldn't have 
bothered to do with SAS.  I also used R to do some ad hoc plotting which 
suggested that my data followed a negative binomial distribution better 
than a Poisson.  Again, I could probably have done this in SAS, but I 
certainly wouldn't have bothered.

I don't think that the choice between SAS and the dialects of S is an 
``either this or that'' choice at all; you really should get familiar 
with both, and use whichever is best for the job at hand.

Hope this helps you,
Nels


Michael Reinecke wrote:
> Hello!
> 
>  
> 
> Disapointed about SPSS I have to choose another statistic program. And 
> altough I sympathise with the idea of a non-commercial software-project 
> like R and I like the spirit of the R community (and of course I am not 
> keen on paying 150$ to SAS for a one-year students license), I will 
> probably buy SAS, because people I will work with use SAS and I want a 
> close cooperation with them. Besides I guess that SAS is still much more 
> powerful than SAS.
> 
>  
> 
> But: can ?t you convince me to choose R? I would appreciate that very 
> much, because my sympathy is with the r-project. Maybe the syntax of 
> both programs is quite similar, so I will still be able to exchange a 
> lot of experience with my SAS-using future collegues!? Or I could even 
> convince the newcomers to swap to R!?
> 
>  
> 
> If you know some arguments, I should consider for my decission, I am 
> looking forward to hear (or read) of you!
> 
>  
> 
> Michael
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Michael Reinecke
> Turnerstr. 3a
> 49076 Osnabr?ck
> 
> Germany
> Tel: +49-541-64147
> mreineck at uos.de <mailto:mreineck at uos.de>
> 

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._

Also, the editing features in PC-SAS are v. friendly and pleasant
to
>use. This (in my view) is in contrast to R where I have to use NOTEPAD (in
>Windows anyway) to create a text file which is then included into the
>console (I find it a bit cumbersome).
Emacs, and ESS, are available for Windows, although I must admit
that it is much easier to configure them on Linux.  Other Windows
editors to try are Nedit (good for people used to Word), WinEdt
(not free) and JED.  You don't have to use Notepad.

See
http://www.nedit.org/
http://space.mit.edu/~davis/jed.html
http://www.winedit.com/
and the bottom of http://www.psych.upenn.edu/cattell/edit.html
for others.

Jon
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._