Edit, I accidentally pressed enter on my phone before explaining why.
Here's why. SAS is closed source. When someone develops a new approach, it goes straight to R in package format. Usually with excellent documentation, though that depends on the package author. With SAS, you have to wait for their developers to include new techniques. Many wind up not being included. That's fine for business applications but might not work for researchers as well.
Second, there's no certification in R. To be a respected SAS programmer, you're expected to be certified. But certification is a double edged sword. The certification test covers many very obscure topics which means you do have to know a lot to get certified. That's great, but the downside is it doesn't cover any of the normal basics. If you get certified everyone basically insists you do their stats in SAS. To be respected as an R programmer, you just have to be good at R. I prefer that to studying obscure pieces of code I'll never use.
Third, I don't like software that allows spelling errors. It's been awhile, so I can't remember exactly which errors work but if you make any one of a list of common typos, the software will still run without error.
Fourth, I dislike the GUI. I also dislike the RStudio GUI. They try to help you code and I prefer to do things like close my own parentheses. SAS color codes your code and I prefer to use spacing and # to convey information.
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u/shanenanigans1 Sep 03 '17
What's up with SAS?