Thomas Paulsen:

  bash is clearly more advanced. ksh is retro computing.

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Shell wars are, in the end, no more interesting than editor wars.

I use bash on Linux systems because it's the least-poorly
supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which bash
is there by default.  Ksh isn't.

I use ksh on OpenBSD systems because it's the least-poorly
supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which kh
is there by default.  Bash isn't.

I don't actually care for most of the extra crap in either
of those shells.  I don't want my shell to do line editing
or auto-completion, and I find the csh-derived history
mechanisms more annoying than useful so I turn them off
too.  To my mind, the Research 10/e sh had it about right,
including the simple way functions were exported and the
whatis built-in that told you whether something was a
variable or a shell function or an external executable,
and printed the first two in forms easily edited on the
screen and re-used.

Terminal programs that don't let you easily edit input
or output from the screen and re-send it, and programs
that abet them by spouting gratuitous ANSI control
sequences: now THAT's what I call retro-computing.

Probably further discussion of any of this belongs in
COFF.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON