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Add to SafariWhen comparing Scratch vs DASH, the Slant community recommends Scratch for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Scratch is ranked 21st while DASH is ranked 44th. The most important reason people chose Scratch is:
Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Great starting point for kids
Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.
Pro Visual
Code is represented as visual building blocks that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.
Pro Easy to learn
Scratch is designed to teach computational thinking rather than focus on specific syntax. It was designed specifically to be easy to learn for anyone over the age of 8.
Pro No need to be able to type
Pro Can be used to create games
Pro Highly structured
The language is highly structured. Therefore, it gives you the essentials of how to think like a programmer and teaches you good programming practices from early on, so you could write clean, working and readable code in the future.
Pro Default shell on Debian systems
DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead.
Pro Full POSIX support
It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells.
Pro A perfect clone
It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell.
Pro Fast startup
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
Pro Low memory usage, which matters a lot in embedded
It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX.
Cons
Con Does not teach you programming
Learning Scratch might help you if you have high difficulty with logical thinking. However, starting with a proper programming language, especially an easy one, will give you the benefits of starting with something like Scratch and everything else.
Con For kids, so don't even mention it in a job interview: it makes you look like a noob.
Con Won't get you a job
Scratch is not a language used in the workplace. Instead it teaches computational thinking, helping to create a foundation to aid in learning other languages.
Con Strange OOP
Scratch has a very strange implementation of OOP that is sprite based, and will become very confusing when you move to other languages.
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh.
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