When comparing VBA vs DASH, the Slant community recommends DASH for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” DASH is ranked 52nd while VBA is ranked 75th. The most important reason people chose DASH is:
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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Immediate practical use.
VBA contains all of the same ingredients as more general-purpose programming language and can be immediately put to use in a professional capacity from inside Windows programs such as Excel.
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.
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.
Cons
Con Limited Use
While it makes a lot of sense for someone wanting to get the most out of Microsoft Office and a handful of other applications, perhaps for the very practical reason of bolstering performance at work, it is restricted to use in those applications and is not suited for more general use most learners of programming are seeking.
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh
.