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Quentin
Super User

Thanks @ChrisHemedinger.  I recognize that you are one of the leaders in posting SAS examples and tools to GitHub (both from your book, and your blog).  So thanks for that.

 

I think it's a reasonable question for SGF and Regional User Group committees to consider:

 

Right now, most UG conferences do a good job of archiving papers, and making them accessible and searchable.  Would there be a benefit to having a standard way of archiving the related code, and make it accessible and google-able?

 

Well, I just wandered over to

  http://www.lexjansen.com/cgi-bin/xsl_transform.php?x=sgf2016&c=sugi

 

And see that there are a good hanful of papers from last year that have the option to download a data file.  And the papers and data files are of course also available at the source:

  http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings16/

 

So that's great.  Still, maybe if this code was stored in a more code-friendly format that was searchable, more people would find it. 

 

That said, I think it's great that SGF has this option for authors to upload code.  Browsing through the RUGs, it looks like there are very few papers where authors have attached a data file.  I think anything UGs can do to encourage authors to submit code along with their paper, and host that code and related files along with the papers, would be a benefit to the SAS community.

 

 

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Lex_SAS
SAS Employee

Yes, at lexjansen.com I try to make additional resources available with the papers. But it is a manual process for adding this metadata.

For years, I had a banner inviting people to contact me if they wanted any code or presentation added to their paper link.

The response to that was minimal.

I'm always open to other suggestions.

Having people upload their own code would be ideal, but adds a lot of management (user management, security, ...)/

 

Lex

 

Reeza
Super User

I think this is a personal  work style issue rather than just post SUGI code on GitHub.

 

The conferences/paper are all volunteer written and there is no organization that I know of that would take on converting all that code to GitHub.

 

One of the best advices I received when starting to learn a language was to create my own code snippets and keep those in a handy reference document. There are others out there, but building your own is a useful learning exericise.

 

I keep my snippets on GitHub and there are other public SAS repositories as shown by @ChrisHemedinger

 

https://gist.github.com/statgeek

 

 

Quentin
Super User

Agree @Reeza, wan't suggesting that someone go through past proceedings and extract all the code.  And to be honest, it's been far too long since I've submitted a paper for a UG, so I can't remember how it worked.

 

But I can imagine a process where, when authors submit their final paper, they were also encouraged to submit a separate file with code (and perhaps data). So the UG volunteers responsible for managing publication of the proceedings would have the papers and the associated code file, allowing them to post both.  The papers could be posted as they are now, but the code could be in some sort of code-friendly repository.  Not necessarily designed for collaboration like github, but somehwhere where code would be google-able, copy-and-paste-able, and perhaps even discussable. 

 

I think if the authors uploaded the separate code file along with their paper, it wouldn't be a lot more work to post the code files somewhere useful.  And if it were done in a systematic way, hopefully it would mean less manual work for @Lex_SAS. : )

BASUG is hosting free webinars Next up: Jane Eslinger presenting PROC REPORT and the ODS EXCEL destination on Mar 27 at noon ET. Register now at the Boston Area SAS Users Group event page: https://www.basug.org/events.
Reeza
Super User

@Quentin Sorry, I was commenting on the expectation of SUGI's existing on GitHub when they predate it significantly. I'm not sure someone can appreciate the body of knowledge that's managed to stay open in SAS although it is not open source. 

 

I'm not sure GitHub is organized for something quite like SAS Global Forum but I may not understand it well enough in terms of managing multi-user projects. 

 

I think what the original poster is interested in, is something that sascommunity.org may have been aiming to accomplish originally. 

It's a valuable resource anyways. 

Reeza
Super User

Last comment, R/Python are open source, SAS is not. 

 

I like that I get paid for my work, and paid well, so making 'everything' open probably isn't the road I'm going to head down. Intellectual property is a great idea, colloboration is a great idea, open source is a great idea, but I also need to pay my pharmacy so I have enough drugs to function semi-normally.  Drugs are expensive. 

 

FYI - This is starting to be a larger issue in open source communities. 

 

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