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Comment by meuk | Hacker News Reader

Nitpicking: Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't know what SAS is. I have learned to always introduce abbreviations before using them. I think more people should do this.

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Since this comment is so high, save you a click:

SAS (previously "Statistical Analysis System") is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics.

SAS was developed at North Carolina State University from 1966 until 1976, when SAS Institute was incorporated. SAS was further developed in the 1980s and 1990s with the addition of new statistical procedures, additional components and the introduction of JMP. A point-and-click interface was added in version 9 in 2004. A social media analytics product was added in 2010.

According to IDC, SAS is the largest market-share holder in "advanced analytics" with 35.4 percent of the market as of 2013. It is the fifth largest market-share holder for business intelligence (BI) software with a 6.9% share and the largest independent vendor. It competes in the BI market against conglomerates, such as SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, SPSS Modeler, Oracle Hyperion, and Microsoft BI. SAS has been named in the Gartner Leader's Quadrant for Data Integration Tool and for Business Intelligence and Analytical Platforms. A study published in 2011 in BMC Health Services Research found that SAS was used in 42.6 percent of data analyses in health service research, based on a sample of 1,139 articles drawn from three journals.

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_(software)

TL;DR: It’s kind of a big deal in analytics.

I fully agree. To me, SAS is either an airline company or british special forces, so I have no idea which company this blogpost is about - and I'm not going to start researching to find out which company a blog post about a company is talking about.

However, to be somewhat of a hypocrite, I don't mind abbreviations for broadly known terms, such as SaaS, DevOps or db. I guess it boils down to the context.

* Flashbacks to when I was learning to program and people were dropping mysterious acronyms like SaaS (and its _aaS compadres)

> However, to be somewhat of a hypocrite, I don't mind abbreviations for broadly known terms, such as SaaS, DevOps or db. I guess it boils down to the context.
Well, at least SaaS and DevOps are easily googleable. Still, in any type of written article, I would just take the time to write out the abbreviated thing in full the first time. Takes maybe 2 seconds and 10 letters more, and you won't have people like me complaining :)

Hi. I wrote the blog post. (Someone else published the link on HN.) Thanks for reading. SAS is not an acronym. And since I write for an audience of people who work with data science and machine learning, I assume that readers know the largest vendor in the category.

Thank you for your answer, I understand now. SAS not being an acronym mostly voids my critique. I am reading your blog post somewhat out of context, since I am not a data scientist.
That said, the rest of the article is very accessible for me - my only confusion was what SAS is. Maybe a link to a page that explains what SAS is would be a good solution?

Appreciate the feedback. I write for an audience that is familiar with the leading vendors in data science and machine learning.

Anybody who studied Bachelor of Science in Statistics knows what is SAS. It is a statistics application. It is just like R, SPSS, and Minitab. If you don't know any of these you might know Jupyter Notebook. Also the buzzword for "Statistics" nowadays is "Big Data".

Yeah, I thought something was wrong with Scandinavian Airlines.

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