Lazy Programmer’s Guide to Developing SAS Viya Applications

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Lazy Programmer’s Guide to Developing SAS Viya Applications

Philipp Lenssen writes in an article titled “Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb”

Lazy because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This makes a lazy programmer a smart and efficient programmer.

From a SAS Viya Application developer’s perspective

One of the great strengths of SAS Viya is the large collection of REST APIs that allow customers to integrate SAS Viya capabilities into their applications. Using these APIs, the user’s applications access the full complement of SAS Viya capabilities - data preparation, analysis and reporting.

Just about every SAS Viya application will call a few key services to do the heavy lifting on the Viya server. The figure below shows these typical patterns.

How many times does one have to write the same code to call different REST APIs when those are all similar, but for the payload? How many times does one to have to write code to “reduce” the JSON response to be useful in presentations?

You too can become a smart lazy programmer by using the techniques discussed in this article titled Lazy Programmer’s Guide to Developing SAS Viya Applications.

Avoid writing code that "writes itself", spend more time solving real business problems and use the extra time doing things you always wanted to do - like watching the world go by.