Paper 37

Becoming Trilingual: A Story of a SAS Programmer Learning R and Python

September 23, 2025: 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Careers, Training, and Education (CTE), Breakout Room #7

Authors	Abstract
Aaron Brown	This paper serves primarily as an introduction and encouragement to SAS programmers who are interested in learning another language. Using the free and open-source R and Python languages as examples, we discuss learning these languages and give an example of how to write the same (relatively simple) program in SAS, R, and Python. We also discuss some of the more powerful tools to leverage multiple languages, although a thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.

Aaron Brown

This paper serves primarily as an introduction and encouragement to SAS programmers who are interested in learning another language. Using the free and open-source R and Python languages as examples, we discuss learning these languages and give an example of how to write the same (relatively simple) program in SAS, R, and Python. We also discuss some of the more powerful tools to leverage multiple languages, although a thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.