Look Ruby, it’s not you, it’s me. I have just grown out of you. I know we haven’t been together that long, but I will always treasure the time we spent together. Remember when we scraped Twitter? Those were good times. But to tell you the truth I am going back to my ex. I know, I know, I said I was done with Python, but Python just has, well, it’s about the analytics.

So in this installment, I want to talk about a topic near and dear to us all, analytical programming. During my little journey deeper into the heart of data science I have been struggling with where to start, specifically what tool provides the most functionality for the kind of work I will be doing, and has enough support that I won’t be all by myself using it. Given that I have been working with SAS for the last 5 years, it would seem like the obvious choice. Sadly, as those of you SAS users know, it’s actually quite a limited platform. Most of the source code has not been updated since the 80’s; it has...