data mining and software development

I've been posting a bit at the yahoo group "datamining2"--we'll see how interesting that group is. I recently responded to a post about java and data mining, and even found another blog that discussed that very issue earlier this week (I just found that post today) -- http://dataminingresearch.blogspot.com/

I don't code anymore, at least not seriously. One reason for that is because the data mining software environments have progessed to the point that I don't need to dust off my C/C++ skills (or lack thereof). And in those relatively rare cases that I do need to program, I can use 4th generation languages, which are quite powerful (if I can ever remember the syntax, but that's another story altogether). Nearly every data mining software package has it's own language: S-Plus command line for S-Plus and Insightful Miner, Clem for Clementine, CART has its own language, Matlab, Visual Basic for Statistica, and of course SAS in Enterprise Miner. This is just naming a few, of course.