Are they statisticians by any chance? Their domain knowledge would be much more important than programming experience. Conversely, for a programmer experienced in a classical PL (FORTRAN, LISP, C, Java), SAS is quite a shock. Data-oriented computation models (like SAS has) are not so common any more.
Not really I write a lot of SAS (Engineer at an Industrial plant) it is what we use to query all our production databases and to write Reports for operators.
If you know SQL or anything about databases SAS is very easy to pick up. My background from University was Java and C I had few difficulties.
My House-mate is a statistician he works in finance and uses R my understanding is R is a bit more difficult as it doesn't have anything like SAS's Proc SQL never used it myself though.
Coincidently Fortran is used very heavily in models here as well.
