I'm a longtime SAS user and I'm going to retire in about five years. I have SAS through my job and I'm allowed to use it for personal use. I don't use it much for personal use, but I do use it some for things and I like it a lot. But I don't use SAS's extensive capabilities. I just use the datastep, maybe procs freq, means, print, and simple stuff like that.
When I retire, my SAS is going to go away. I can live without proc mixed and all that stuff since I'll no longer be doing serious statistical analyses by then, but I sure am going to miss the datastep and those other things to do small daily projects that I like to do. I'd sure like it if someone told me there was a real stripped down version of SAS I could buy for maybe $100-200 per year. Because otherwise I'd have to pay thousands of dollars per year for full SAS and then not use 99.9% of it, and I'm not going to do that. But from my research I'm guessing you'll say, sorry, there is no stripped down version of SAS that costs way less than full SAS.
If that's the case, any suggestions on what I can use instead? I know R a little and I like SAS way better. I find R a little annoying. But I guess I'll just break down and learn it better and use it some in retirement since my only alternative seems to be using nothing at all.
Thanks for reading. Any thoughts or info is appreciated.
