I hear ya Marty - as I also cut my programming teeth in the 70's using SAS! ....but I actually have a bit different story and take (spoiler alert: I've come to basically hate all SAS, EG and otherwise, no matter how hard I try to like it again!). After major programming achievments using SAS back in the 80's, including a complex dissertation using SAS/IML, I counted myself back as a SAS guru/expert. And then I began a long career in Marketing Research, where everyone uses SPSS....so I migrated over to SPSS. I used in extensively daily, though occasionally (< 5% of time) used special macros only available in SAS. SPSS has some amazingly elegantly simple functionalities that leave SAS in the dust. I could quickly throw data into SPSS use Aggregate to do all dorts of distilling and be back in Excel for reporting in like 30 seconds .... now (having to use SAS) it takes me 10 minutes plus I have to do all the ancillary stuff of Data step, save project (not data?) in EG, etc. etc. SAS now frustrates me to no end - though I used to be its biggest fan. Odd. But I am certain for 99% of the tasks I do (including high end modeling) I can do in SPSS (using both point/click and code) in half to 75% of the time what it takes to do same in SAS. In fact, I'd love to se some head to head "speed and ease" competitions....I'll be first to sign up!