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Comment by Saline9515 | Hacker News Reader

- The division doing the change wasn't doing anything critical, mostly yearly statistical analysis reports, and cost estimates for new laws. The move could have been done over a year or two. Most public workers aren't overwhelmed with work, to put it mildly.

- SAS language is horrendous, the IDE is stuck in the 2000´s, and everyone was doing SQL queries inside it as a result. SAS is obsolete compared to what R or Python can do. Career-wise, it's a dead end for workers who use it.

- The French state is heavily indebted, so any cost-saving measure is welcome to reduce the burden on the taxpayer.

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But everyone experienced in such a "migration" would challenge your flawed impression that there would be cost saving. SAS is in fact used in many serious companies (I know it's used at the fraud department of Bouygues Telecom, for instance) so you're not gonna dead-end yourself all that much, you can do the python+r stuff on your own probably, as long as the reports are there, and call them from SAS if you cannot stand it.

Meanwhile, nothing has to move, nothing has to change, and your non-critical division will continue to cost exactly as budgeted instead of going through unknown waters just because maybe switching to something new might be ... cheap eventually ?

Plus this has nothing to do with Microsoft really, as most cost is in Windows and its integration. It's hard to replace the global policies of Windows by an alternative.

IDK man, getting some department out from under the thumb of the big org's IT is pretty much SOP when BigCo has a "oh crap we gotta compete in this niche, spin up an internal startup" moment.

Yeah, the plan is insane if you're talking about the entire french government.

What are the costs of using python/R? I'm not talking about the full french gov, but a single division (around 25 workers), for which the procurement is done.

This is in reality a clear cost-saving measure, as you may have to pay one time for training, which is however done by another division of the French State (the statistical body, INSEE), and those career workers don't get bonuses or are paid overtime anyway.

Afaik other "big corps" are moving away from SAS as graduate only know Python/R nowadays, which are better and more flexible tools.

Improving tooling and reducing costs are just a thing for private companies. Yeah, the horse carriage drivers weren't happy when the gasoline engine appeared. Imagine the switching costs! There are still horse carriages around! Horses are reliable! You can drive a car on your own!

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