Considered as a programming language, Bicicleta has some drawbacks. 1. It tends to err silently. If you use it in the way I expect people normally will, with every argument to every function having a sensible default, the consequence is that forgetting or misspelling the argument in the function call will produce a wrong result rather than an error message. And, by design, there's no way to detect and complain about extra arguments --- for example, if you misspell the argument name.
You can reduce the first part of this problem by overriding all the arguments with errors in the public version of a function, or deleting them entirely from the definition, but I expect this to be uncommon. 2. There's no way to override the behavior on derivation. "No way to detect extra arguments" is a special case of this. 3. There's no multiple inheritance. 4. There's no static typing. 5. Class hierarchies are likely to be relatively deep. This has been an obstacle to understanding in other languages in the past, such as Smalltalk, but I am hoping that Bicicleta's user interface improvements will compensate. 6. You can define new methods on objects inherited from existing classes, and you can evaluate code in a context where it will use your modified objects instead of the basic ones, but it might be to add new methods to standard library objects, just as in Java or Python. I expect that these drawbacks will be less important than its advantages.
