In SAS Viya Workbench, you can use a SAS Notebook to organize your program code with documentation and output, just as you might have done with Jupyter or Python notebooks. The SAS Notebook file type is supported in the SAS extension for VS Code, which is baked into SAS Viya Workbench. Personally, I love to use the SAS Notebook format for step-by-step programming demos; it's a great way to organize steps and explanations.   Sample SAS Notebook for a demo   Some users have ask for a way to %INCLUDE a SAS Notebook file into a SAS session to run the code that you've stored in that external file. %INCLUDE is a tried-and-true method to allow users to organize code libraries -- collections of .SAS files -- for easy re-use, but the SAS runtime cannot read SAS Notebook files (.sasnb files) directly.   I've created a SAS macro called %includesasnb that supports this task. The macro takes advantage of the fact that notebook files are structured using JSON, and SAS can easily read JSON with the JSON libname engine. SAS Notebooks support SAS, SQL and Python code cells, and the macro will assemble all of this content from a SAS Notebook into a continuous program to run in your session. You can also optionally output the full SAS program to another file or to the SAS log.   Using %includesasnb in SAS Viya Workbench   You can find the %includesasnb macro and brief documentation about it in this GitHub location. If you want to pull the macro directly into your SAS Viya Workbench session from GitHub, this code segment does that for you:   /* Pull %includesasnb.sas from GitHub */ filename src "%sysfunc(getoption(WORK))/includesasnb.sas"; proc http method='GET' url="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sascommunities/sas-dummy-blog/master/includesasnb/includesasnb.sas" out=src; run; %include src;   You can then use the macro to run code from a SAS Notebook you've stored in your Workbench:   /* Use the macro to run my local notebook file */ %includesasnb(filepath=sasnotebooks/sample-nb.sasnb); ... View more

Hi SAS Enthusiasts,   If you follow tech like I do, you've come across a variety of "top programming languages" lists. These annual or biannual lists always capture my attention, and this year I was pleased to see that SAS earned a higher placement on the IEEE Spectrum 2024 list of Top Programming Languages. SAS specifically shows well in the Jobs ranking (#5), reflecting the demand in the market for SAS skills.   I want to know what you think about this list and the SAS placement: do you feel it reflects the importance and usefulness of SAS in your professional life? I would love to hear about how SAS skills opened career opportunities for you.    While you're thinking about your reply, I'll share my take. I have studied these lists for years (from IEEE, from TIOBE,from StackOverflow and others). Most of the criteria that is used to compute rankings, such as Internet searches or GitHub repositories, will always undercount SAS usage. Most SAS customers work in industries where they cannot share their code on GitHub -- their SAS work is tied up too much in the secret sauce that makes their company productive. And as far as the Internet goes, most SAS information sharing happens here in these communities or in conference proceedings that are hosted on our websites. But when you look at job opportunities, there is no denying that SAS skills are critical in many large organizations -- and the job boards reflect that. (See more about IEEE Spectrum's methodology here. They used R for their analysis...oh well.)   The high ranking of SAS, with Python and SQL, tells a bigger story, I think, about the importance of data and data science as a discipline that is still very code-intense, despite the "low code" movement to bring these capabilities to non-programmers.   Tell us -- what do you think of SAS' placement here, and how do you see its unique value in your programming toolbox?   ... View more