Agreed, generally class factories make little sense in languages where a class reference lives at run-time in some or other form. Even some static languages hav

Agreed, generally class factories make little sense in languages where a class reference lives at run-time in some or other form. Even some static languages have this, e.g. ObjC. I would even go with a broader generalization and say that existence of patterns (i.e. things that require a lot of typing) in a given language means the language is underdesigned and/or is behind the times. Which is certainly true for Java for example.