A letter in Jerry Pournelle's mail column: Current Chaos Manor mail
I used SAS on the job for about ten years. I came to loathe it. It has plenty of high-quality canned statistical routines, but if you need something that's not in any of the cans, things get ugly pretty quickly.
Far better is R from http://www.r-project.org/
Aside from its technical superiority, R has the advantage of being open-source and available for downloading without charge, while SAS costs Big Bucks. https://www3.sas.com/order/pricing.jsp?code=PERSANLBNDL Remember the uproar over Microsoft going to annual-subscription-based pricing? Well, SAS has been that way from the beginning: when your subscription runs out, SAS *stops*working*. How cool is *that*??
I've been very happy with Open Office for a couple of years now. I imagine other open source ware can also be quite good.
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