Dynamic Magic: Imagine adding methods and variables to objects at runtime. Seems odd - how do other objects know what methods they can call. Seems scary. Seems kind of cool. » Read more

Sun bails on NetBeans merger with Eclipse: Sun has chosen to discontinue discussions about coalescing NetBeans with Eclipse. — John D. Mitchell

The Peter Principle: software developers version: There's a classic book called The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter. The short summary is that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. Why this should be is pretty obvious: if someone is good at what they do, they get a promotion.  — James Gosling

Regular Expressions in J2SE
The rules for building regular expressions seem so simple and straightforward and yet it doesn't take long before you are writing obscure looking very powerful code. Hetal C. Shah's article Regular Expressions in J2SE is an overview and introduction to adding the power of Reg Ex to your Java applications. You'll often reach for the regex package for "Parsing, Data validation, String manipulation, [and] Data extraction and report generation."

Dynamic Productivity with Ruby
Bill Venners continues his discussion with Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto in Dynamic Productivity with Ruby . Matz explains that in Ruby, methods and variables can be added to objects at runtime so that you can create a proxy that wraps any object because the "proxy can probe the object inside of it and just morph into the proxy for that object." Matz designed Ruby to focus on programming efficiency perhaps at the cost of runtime efficiency. He explains "The implementer should care about performance, but the designer shouldn't. If you care about performance, you will focus on machines in design instead of on humans. So you shouldn't focus on performance in design."