notes.txt

Completed:

    Haskell2048:
        - It was particularly annoying to fit in the random number generation after the fact
        - lots of difficulty with debugging with print statements
        - it really constraints how you can solve a problem such that certain things just
          can't be done (without doing something unsafe or using external bindings, or
          fighting with a custom library which does the dirty work in a performant way)

    Ocaml2048:
        - I started this after getting stuck on the Haskell version, and it was a breeze by
          comparison, but I know the language better and have written a lot more code in it

    Racket2048:
        - the object system that the drawing library uses was pretty clumsy compared to the
          other versions, and it seemed unnatural to do so much state mutation after writing
          the Haskell and Ocaml versions
        - the postfix style gets a bit tiring after a while, compared to the ML languages
          above, which feel more natural

    Elixir2048:
        - by far the most "heavy" feeling, with a lot of background stuff to spin up
        - the graphics library seems like a complete encapsulation of the program such that
          you're quite beholden to what it allows and how it behaves.  More like a framework
        - dynamic typing and bare assignments seemed kinda weird after the other versions

Incomplete:

    CommonLisp2048:
        - it seemed like the only graphics library that was well maintained was the SDL
          bindings, but I couldn't get text easily and didn't want to dig into SDL to get
          something working, so I didn't complete it.  It would have been pretty similar
          to the racket version in terms of the game manipulation

Possible Other Version:
- F#
- Elm
- Smalltalk
- Go

Unlikely But Possible:
- Standard ML
- Julia
- Scala
- Ada
- Swift
- Nim
- Crystal
- Chapel
- Mercury


Thoughts:
    - this game isn't the best evaluation of some of these languages because it requires some
      kind of graphics or display, which a lot of languages either don't have support for, or
      are not well maintained because the language is primarily used in other domains.
    - It is always possible to print the text for the entire board each time or use ncurses,
      but that wouldn't compare as well to the implementations using a GUI, and for this game
      in particular, I feel like it would be disorienting to have multiple board printouts on
      screen (not using ncurses), but I haven't tried it so I'm not sure