Why Logo is Not Useful for Real Work and What Can Be Done About It
As I've been playing around with Logo lately I've asked myself the question, "Could we use this for REAL programs?" IE outside the educational toy-language context? Can Logo be used for grown-up stuff? The answer, sadly, is a resounding NO, not in it's current state. But with a bit of work it would not actually be that hard to make Logo a useful scripting language, or even a systems language, like it's Lisp fore-bearer. The major issue is that reading untrusted data directly into Logo words is grossly insecure. No sane sysadmin would deploy such a monstrosity in production. Parts of the solution exist in various Logos, but none of them have brought it all together. Many older Logos were capable of reading binary data into arrays but lacked higher level APIs for processing strings and may remain vulnerable to malformed or malicious data. None of the CLI Logos support command line arguments or environment variables. FFI's are rare, especially in newer Logos....
