Believe me, I know. The code just becomes unreadable when you put all execution inside the same data step and use hash table to do fast small to big merging. And not to mention debugging that mess when you have a macro layer on top of it. Not having access to function source code, installation process being what it was. I do not miss it.

And yes technically SAS is faster than R but part of the equation is how many people can make SAS code faster than R/python. I had maybe, 1-2 people that could write efficient SAS code.

One version we had was a bunch of macro producing hash merge plus the whole how can I do something without having to get out of the data step. Just horrible. Number of characters in a line of code? You forgot your quote somewhere and now you have to run the magic line.

I hope I'm not too emotional when I say I hope SAS disappears from my industry and we embrace less adversarial licensing.