Elm vs Godot

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests.

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do.

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven.

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web.

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable.

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type.

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in.

Elm uses easy to use modules.

Use:

import List
import List as L
import List exposing (..)
import List exposing ( map, foldl )
import Maybe exposing ( Maybe )
import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) )
import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) )

Creation:

module MyModule exposing (foo, bar)

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what.

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included.

The lack of side-effects and simple, consistent language semantics make it easy to quickly review incoming changes.

Pure functions, immutable data structures, amazing compiler, clean and homologous syntax used for HTML, logic, and optionally to replace CSS, elimination of entire classes of bugs so you don't even need most unit tests. These factors lead to better code, better programs, higher confidence, and ultimately, more satisfaction.

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible.

Godot has a mature 2D engine with many features used by modern 2D games.

The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size.

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth.

Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily.

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from here, and compile the engine themselves.

You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class.

Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten).

Officially, Godot supported languages for now will be GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++.

Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy.

Every property can be animated.

Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more.

All the game development work is done inside one program: the engine editor. The scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front-end editors.

The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently.

An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun.

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations can be found here.

Godot has their own scripting language called GDScript. The scripting language is easy to learn with Python-like syntax, but it is not Python. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it was custom built for optimized integration with the Godot Engine.

It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion.

A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked.

The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future.

Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do.

The engine is build not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git.

Godot is very portable, you can download the file from a website then put it on a USB and run it on your other computer without any troublesome errors.

With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way.

The documentation used to be weak, but now we have nathen with his help the documentation is the strongest advantage.

Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized.

The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts.

The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself.

No need to learn anything with node, you can build a game without typing a line of code + has visual scripting.

There is no royalty and the game you made + engine itself is yours.

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store.

In addition to the scene editor and the script editor (with debugger), the engine also provides a tile map editor, an animation editor (not just for rigs), a performance monitor, a network profiler, and an audio bus console.

It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. This was however removed in Godot 4, so you will need to use the (still supported) Godot 3 branch for visual scripting.