R is to SAS as Java is to COBOL

An interview with Revolution Analytics CEO Dave Rich was published this week by BeyeNetwork. During the interview, Dace was asked about how the statistical modeling platforms have changed over the decades:

People have been doing statistical modeling and predictive analytics for 50 years now, SAS and SPSS have been around since the early ‘70s. What’s different now -- what’s making this move toward other statistical and “big data” areas?

David Rich: Well, I think obviously SAS and SPSS have been around, as you pointed out, for decades. We call that sort of the first generation of analytics and insight-driven solutions. In my perspective, having been in the business for more than three decades, it reminds me a bit of what COBOL was back in the day relative to business software. I see R as the more modern language. In this analogy, R would represent Java or C++. What happened in the middle of the nineties when the shift occurred is very similar to where we are now with R. Open source is a worldwide collaboration innovation. It’s a way to tap into that channel for research, and I think the role that Revolution Analytics can play – very similar to what Red Hat did back in the Linux days – is to be the conduit between the community and enterprise deployment.

The conversation also touched on the future of big data analytics, impact of advanced analytics on business, and the benefits of R and Revolution R Enteprise to reduce costs and expand the scope of possibility with big data analytics. For the complete interview, follow the link below.

BeyeNetwork: Advanced Analytics, Big Data and the Power of R: A Q&A Spotlight with David Rich, CEO of Revolution Analytics

Comments

[EyeLoveSAS]

Meh. Again with this self-serving SAS vs. R garbage.
I use both and other tools as well.
R is no silver bullet and can be as much of a pain as SAS some days.
As of today, my SAS clients pay me astronomically much more than my R clients. Until that changes, I’ll keep renewing my SAS license.

[Jan Galkowski]

COBOL isn't that bad and forces programmers to do many things which otherwise require self-discipline. And Java isn't that good: Compare it to Smalltalk.

Also, while I use R every day and have a very high opinion of it and it's community, primarily because of its functional programming roots, it is not as powerful as OCAML and it's packages are of uneven quality and level of documentation. It suffers from open source values, which encourage sloppiness and satisficing, defended by a philosophy no more ptoven than efficient markets.

SAS has its place, as do Minitab and MATLAB.

[Robert Young]

I find a different analogy more apt: R is to SAS as Visual Basic is to C.

First, java largely *is* COBOL. Much of what was done in COBOL has been "ported" to webservers under java. New development in corporations use COBOL paradigms in java syntax. The universality of java hasn't come to be. Remember applets, etc.? Gone and long forgotten. Enterprise java is most of java, these days (and, no, Android isn't java). There's yet another version EJB just to satisfy the Fortune X00, the natural constituency of SAS/SPSS.

Visual Basic, on the other hand, brought "programming" to the masses, while C was relegated to enterprise-y demands. The same is still true of R vs. SAS (or SPSS, recently wed to IBM).

The recent, essentially, interest in Rcpp is an effort to bridge both the file handling and performance gap. Much the same motivation from VB6 (the last true VB) to .NET, which is C# with pink ribbons.

[Francisco Palm]

WRONG! R is to SAS as Python is to Java...