My apologies, this obviously doubles as my "for registration purposes" account and so I don't often send from it - I was not intentionally being so secretive : )
At any rate, I completely agree, but of course it's a reciprocal relationship. The software is written in SAS because that's what the organizations use, the organizations use SAS because that's what the programs are written in... For better or worse, SAS's integration in big bureaucracies is the main thing that keeps it competitive in the marketplace and viable. There aren't a lot of other contexts in which their pricing structure would work. Bryan On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Frank E Harrell Jr < f.harr...@vanderbilt.edu> wrote: > spam me wrote: > >> I've actually used AHRQ's software to create Inpatient Quality Indicator >> reports. I can confirm pretty much what we already know; it is >> inefficient. >> Running on about 1.8 - 2 million cases, it would take just about a whole >> day >> to run the entire process from start to finish. That isn't all processing >> time and includes some time for the analyst to check results between >> substeps, but I still knew that my day was full when I was working on IQI >> reports. >> >> >> >> To be fair though, there are a lot of other factors (beside efficiency >> considerations) that go into AHRQ's program design. First, there are a >> lot >> of changes to that software every year. In some cases it is easier and >> less >> error prone to hardcode a few points in the data so that it is blatantly >> obvious what to change next year should another analyst need to do so. >> Second, >> the organizations that use this software often require transparency and >> may >> not have high level programmers on staff. Writing code so that it is >> accessible, editable, and interpretable by intermediate level programmers >> or >> analysts is a plus. Third, given that IQI reports are often produced on a >> yearly basis, there's no real need to sacrifice clarity, etc. for >> efficiency >> - you're only doing this process once a year. >> >> >> >> There are other points that could be made, but the main idea is I don't >> think it's fair to hold this software up, out of context, as an example of >> SAS's (or even AHRQs) inefficiencies. I agree that SAS syntax is nowhere >> near as elegant or as powerful as R from a programming standpoint, that's >> why after 7 years of using SAS I switched to R. But comparing the two at >> that level is like a racing a Ferrari and a Bentley to see which is the >> better car. >> > > Dear Anonymous, > > Nice points. I would just add that it would be better if > government-sponsored projects would result in software that could be run > without expensive licenses. > > Thanks > Frank > > >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide >> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >> >> > > -- > Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine > Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
