I'm 100% stealing this post's title from the late Sydney J. Harris, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. His Friday column typically held this title; man, he would have loved the Internet!
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So I’m thinking about statistical programming and associated job opportunities because I recently heard of yet another company divesting itself of its statistical programmers (moving them to a third party).
And my thinking leads me to a question: what does the world think about statistical programming? What the world thinks, I decide, may be associated with what Google “finds” – so I run a quick search.
Minutes later, I’m on the Wikipedia page for “statistical programming languages” and I find there’s much out there that I know little (or nothing) about – but not as much as I would have thought. There are only 16 entries; along with the usual suspects like SAS and R, there are other languages which are new to me.
It turns out that this page is a subset of a parent domain called “statistical software” – and it’s a sibling of a page holding “data analysis software.” And those pages are much broader in scope than my original anchor of “statistical programming languages.”
What have I learned from this exploration?
One thing is that I believe Wikipedia could be better organized with respect to this stuff – so who can I blame? J
Within Wikipedia, there is no entry for “statistical programmer.” Perhaps it’s a good time to add one, and perhaps we are just the people who can do this.
Anyone up for that challenge?
I'm tagging this activity to myself, as a "to do." If you happen to be browsing Wikipedia some day, and you see such an entry - of course, you'll have the power to update it as you like!