I'm honestly surprised and disappointed to see how little SAS has adapted to competition. I'm sure they'll milk their existing customers for another generation, but it'll kill their business on a long enough timeline.
There was a problem with our license file which meant we got through 5-10 screens of installer and then hit "The SID file you selected is not intended for the order you are deploying because the Tech Support Site Number values do not match. Select a SID file with a matching tech support site number."
And then two weeks later we were finally able to get a correct license file from the IT department. I can't say how much of that was IT's fault or if it really took two weeks to get the fixed license from SAS, but either way I'd be happier to never touch it again.
I'm sure they're all useful to someone (or they were at some point), but boy am I glad to not be in charge of managing that license.
If you guessed "unfucking a SAS license but the renewal utility won't work because it can't get a lock on some file" you win the satisfaction of knowing you were right.
Well, as I recall it, it's more of a database management / software development package with an integrated data manipulation language (the original one, among the at least three "languages" it contains) to make new datasets based on existing ones. Yes, as an imperative Turing-complete language that's much more powerful than SQL, but it carries with it a huge overhead in the form of the whole rest of the system. Not to mention the lock-in.
Yes, I know Octave exists, no it can't do everything Matlab can do and a lot of the programs I saw used needed Matlab specific things.