DASH vs Common Lisp
When comparing DASH vs Common Lisp, the Slant community recommends Common Lisp for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Common Lisp is ranked 19th while DASH is ranked 52nd. The most important reason people chose Common Lisp is:
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
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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.
Pro Carefully designed for interactive use
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
Pro Very Powerful REPL with SLIME
SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs).
Pro Condition/restart system
It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL.
Pro Image based runtime
The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program.
Pro Almost as fast as, or faster than, C
Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code.
Cons
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh
.