Drawbacks
Although the templates are editable, the template generated code is not, leaving the user with only fixed points (called embeds) to add their own coding, this because of the emphasis on RAD (rapid application development). In practice this is a minimal limitation.
Even in the Enterprise Edition of the development environment, there is optional functionality which requires a separate purchase from the creating company (including but not limited to "IP Data Driver and Server", "In-Memory Database Driver", "Dynamic File Driver", "Oracle Accelerator","TPS ODBC Drivers") . See Soft Velocity.
As a low-level language there are a number of higher-level functionalities (e.g. FTP up-/downloading, communicating with web services,) which are not part of the language. These can be programmed using API's exposed by Windows (for example WinSock). Many third party offerings (Third-party developer) wrap up high-level functionality.
Despite the economic benefits of code-generation, Clarion has never appealed to the wider programming audience. Hence finding trained, experienced Clarion programmers can be difficult. Further, since Clarion is data-centric, it requires programmers familiar with database design concepts.
There are few available external Clarion publications. To balance this however Clarion itself is easy to learn, and has a very active usenet community.
Read more about this topic: Clarion (programming Language)
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“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)