I think we're completely talking past each other. Yes, you can express the game logic succinctly in Haskell. Yes, you will need many more lines in Python or JavaScript. Anything else is conjecture on your part. "Free text" is not executable, so your claim does not seem to be particularly relevant.
Feel free to use the UI as the sole measure of quality, but if that is your stance, you should probably seek a different audience.
I'm not entirely sure you would necessarily need more lines of code to express it in python or Javascript, to be honest. I'll see if I can give it a shot this weekend. Curious to really know. You could certainly use more, but the same could be said of Haskel, as well.
But I'm not necessarily trying to make a claim that it can't be done in Haskel. More that I have not seen it done. You can claim that the final polish of the original is irrelevant, but I find that claim hard to believe. Especially since I have yet to see an example that has said polish.
Sadly, I don't know how you would really go about proving that one way or the other.
So, I realize the odds are rather low you will see this. I took a stab at implementing 2048 in javascript. Depending on what you mean by "many more lines," I'm not sure I agree still. For a hardcoded 4x4 grid, I'm only at 100 lines of code in javascript. (For arbitrary rectangular boards, I'm at 130.)
I'm not going to claim that the code alone is as "pretty" as the Haskel version, but I see no reason it should have exploded to be much larger. I may have to take a look at how other folks are doing this.
:) Then I am continuing to talk right past you. Apologies.
I'll hopefully have more to add to the conversation after I try this game in a language. At face value, I am not at all clear on how this will take 90 lines of javascript. That just seems extreme.
Feel free to use the UI as the sole measure of quality, but if that is your stance, you should probably seek a different audience.