My goto answer when someone asks why I like Haskell so much these days is usually “I like the expressiveness and run time guarantees of Haskell”. For those who are little more interested, I would usually show the popular quick sort or merge sort implementations. I wanted a slightly more complicated, yet commonly known, example to demonstrate what I claimed. This is an attempt at coming up with such an example. And turning it into a blog post makes it available for me all the time (and for other too!!).
I choose Python and Java as other two languages as they are the ones I am fairly comfortable with and also because they are representatives of objected oriented and dynamically typed languages. I do not claim mastery over any of these languages. If you have any suggestions on making any of the these implementations more expressive, let me know and I will update the sample accordingly. Other languages are welcome too!
Edit: Here is my take on what expressiveness mean
All three versions do the same thing. Define a simple Tree type. Instead of
constructing the tree one-element-at-a-time, we provide a convenient function
fromList which takes a list and adds its elements to tree. We also provide a
way to turn the Tree back to a list by providing inorder function to
traverse the tree in-order
The tree construction happens like this: we split the list in to three parts - middle element, left-sublist and right-sublist. Then, we recursively construct left and right sub-tree with the two split parts of the list. The middle element is used at the current node. Why we do it this way? If you pass a sorted list, this will construct a binary search tree. In-order traversal on that tree should return the original sorted list back!