What are the drawbacks/weaknesses of using LOGO?

Question

I was wondering if there were any real drawbacks associated with using LOGO? I know it's meant for teaching kids, but it could theoretically be used for higher level projects. Are there any real drawbacks beside the many different versions of it?

Answer 1

Apart from the practical issues (cross platform support, libraries), I think the main issue is that it has dynamic scope (see this discussion). That tends to get confusing, particularly for a functional language, and leads to difficult-to-solve bugs.

But, other than that, I understand it’s a pretty cool (lispish and underestimated) language (see link above, which has an interesting discussion).

Answer 2

Actually LOGO is quite broadly used: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Mostly the issues are the same as any scripted language. Plus the user base (although not small) definitely isn't huge.

Answer 3

It depends on what you mean by "real". FMSLogo is very mature and stable. It has fast dictionary-like structures called "properties". It has arrays, lists, saves images to GIF, TCP-IP communication, triggers, exceptions, elimination of tail-end recursion. It even support a swiss-knife library that does a bunch of different useful things like HTML generation, date handling, polynomial factoring, numerical integration...

Answer 4

A big drawback would be lack of support for specific problems you may encounter using a site such as this. Just see how many logo related posts there are here compared to say java or c++.