Despite the title, this is not the new show in Las Vegas. John Sall is Mr. JMP . In fact, it is said behind his back that JMP actually stands for John’s Macintosh Project, this being the product SAS started about the time that they made the move away from running SAS on Mac OS…
In three minutes before the next statistics session, here’s some more on the opening session last night. SAS Chief Marketing Officer Jim Davis made the comment that for every SAS product they are asking the question “Is there a mobile application for this and if so what does it look like?” He also showed some…
I was very thrilled to be invited to speak to six classes of seventh- and eighth-grade students at an urban school. Actually, they wanted me to speak to seven classes but there is no way on earth I am getting up at 6:30 a.m. or whatever ungodly hour would be required for me to make…
Yesterday, Matt Keranen (a.k.a. @HybridDBA) made the comment about SAS giving free software to universities as response to R << “Would be nice if they did the same for developers” The more I thought about that, the more convinced I became that he is right. There are a few reasons. First, let’s look at the…
I’ve just been hired on a project that uses SAS and I know nothing but SPSS, but I know that really well. Can I come over to your office tomorrow? … so began a very interesting afternoon, where the new employee would show me code that she had written, say VALUE LABELS and ask, “Can…
The first programming language I learned, 36 years ago, was BASIC, followed by Fortran the next semester. A couple of years later, my employer had me learn COBOL, FORESIGHT and M (the successor to MUMPS). Haven’t touched either in decades and of the three, COBOL is the only one that I’m sure still exists. In…
SAS macros (well, any macros, really – Excel, whatever), can be a great thing. While at first glance they may look a bit hairy, if you have repetitive tasks it makes it easier to debug your code. That may sound nuts at first glance. How can adding something with the %global %do &var and call…
If I were in charge of the world, which, sadly, I am not, there would be a requirement that every statistical programmer be issued a pearl like Glinda the Good had, (the good witch in the Oz books). Glinda’s pearl was white if you were telling the truth and black if you were lying. I’d…
All my programs are working today and I am sad. Fortunately for everyone else, but unfortunately for me today, SAS has increasingly automated or semi-automated fixing those errors. It’s unfortunate for me because I wanted to talk about errors and how to fix these. I could create a simulation dataset but I hate doing that….
You know that guy, supposedly a program, in Tron, the one that yells, “I serve the user”. Well, he never met the first lead engineer I worked with. Reading Donald Farmer’s post “Is it really so?”, I was reminded of something that happened decades ago and it was a lesson I never forgot. I was…