Chris@NZ, if I ever meet you in person, I'll buy you a beer for your excellent postings in this thread. Well behaved, not at all like a rant. It's all very important issues for the SAS user community but even more so for the SAS Institute people (managers as well as software developers). Kudos to those admins for not shutting this down - SAS seems to be moving towards that fancy social web thing all the kids talk about... 😉
Now, back on topic:
I would love to love EG! I eagerly await my chance to get the upcoming features in 4.3. Code completion/predictive typing - YAY! Being able to get that process diagram overview of programs, especially colleagues' handed-over programs - awesome. That's what I do in my head for small programs and for larger programs by printing out several A3 size pages of pt 7 sas code and drawing lines and boxes in hand all over them. Having wizards and tasks for those procedures I can't remember the details of - great for my aging memory.
I really do look forward to it, and I really appreciate and understand the great benefits of the kind of coding/developing EG encourages.
So all others, don't bother painting all those up for me - I know about them and acknowledge them already. We agree, it's good.
However, I have used DMS for quite a few years now, and there seem to be all these small things that I can't do, whenever I try to use EG (4.1 up until now). These things are rarely big bugs, but they're still terribly annoying and counter-productive. Linux communities use the phrase "paper cuts" for all those tiny missing/buggy features that needs fixing, but never get the attention of the software devs. I don't know if these things are like paper cuts, but some of them seems so obvious and easy to fix, that I' amazed they're missing.
The dataviewer including command line and quick where selection (plus some others mentioned earlier) is a must-have. When investigating various data sources, figuring out how to put things together, looking up that one customer which appears a certain way on the front-end screen of the production system, etc etc, I can do it in a snap in DMS. I have some basic keyboard shortcuts to get from one table to my explorer (two-paned folders|content btw), open a new dataset, browse to the right, go to the command window, use where to view on certain row, flip to the other open dataview, do another where command, etc etc. I almost never touch the mouse meanwhile, and that is the main reason I can do it so quickly. Maybe some Counter Strike pro player could use the mouse fast, but a dull office chimp like me, do stuff fast with keyboard, not mouse.
Doing the same thing in EG is slow and painful and the paper cuts my fingers to blood. Why not make it easy, SAS?
If I prefer to use F8 or ctrl+L or shift+alt+B or whatever to get straight from my code editor to a two-paned explorer window with perfect TAB/arrow shortcut functionality, why can't you make that work? This is simple, it's mostly in the interface. It's not rocket science - almost all other applications in various fields across Windows and Linux desktops have had such features for ages. I suppose this is why Chris@NZ mentions Visual Studio IDE.
As others have said (in less harsh words), DMS is a lousy piece of outdated and sub-par interface not at all suitable to modern PC users. However, it does allow some good things for us, and we've come to like those things. If SAS wants us to go to EG, then why not make it worth the shift? Make it shine, make it flexible, make it user-friendly, make it customizable, make it modern.
Someone mentioned Excel - this reminds me of my old happy horse: SAS should go headhunting for some of the interface designers from Redmond, they seem to understand what a user-friendly interface is all about. The joke is getting old though, since every app dev and his younger brother are better than both SAS and MS nowadays 🙂
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