When comparing Squeak vs DASH, the Slant community recommends Squeak for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Squeak is ranked 45th while DASH is ranked 52nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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 Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh
.