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APL in its death throes: SAS vs. APL in the property/casualty insurance industry

Why is SAS and not APL the standard programming language for actuarial programming on the mainframe in the property and casualty insurance industry? To justify the premise of the above question I would note that the two major rating bureaus, Insurance Services Office and the National Council on Compensation Insurance, are SAS shops. If APL exists at either organization, it is primarily as a conversation piece. As for individual P&C companies, in the last three years I have learned of only three where APL applications are being developed on a company wide or department wide basis. Other companies are not developing any new APL applications but are running legacy APL applications. Of course, individual work units within those companies may be actively using APL. In the meantime virtually every job opening for casualty actuaries that I have seen posted in the last three years and that has indicated requirements for mainframe based programming skills has mentioned a knowledge of SAS as one of those requirements. I specifically mentioned the mainframe. To some this may sound quaint. Let me explain. For an insurer of any size or for a rating bureau the raw information that is the foundation of the casualty actuary's work exists in the form of premium, exposure, expense and loss data that has been gathered according to the relevant statistical plan at the individual policy or claim level. Generally this is a considerable amount of data, and it must be assembled, sorted and edited. The day may well come when heavy I/O computing jobs can be performed on a desktop computer using spreadsheets. The day may well not be very distant when such jobs can be performed by Unix based systems. However, as things stand at present this back end processing of the raw statistical data must be done on the legacy COBOL system, i.e., on the mainframe. So the raw information that the casualty actuary needs to do his/her work is initially processed by COBOL. Moreover, the economics of data storage being what they are, the data will be stored on COBOL readable tapes in the corporate tape library. Thus further use of this data depends on retrieving it from this COBOL (batch processing) environment. In many cases the purposes of the casualty actuary are best served by using the raw corporate data in summarized form. In such a case additional production runs may be scheduled to …