Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. I sometimes see people create an entire class wrapping a single factory method, and then override that method in various sub

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. I sometimes see people create an entire class wrapping a single factory method, and then override that method in various subclasses to construct different types of objects. The class, the subclasses, and the factory methods are all redundant in Python. The Twisted framework is an offender that comes to mind. I haven't worked in Java very much, so I'm not sure what the trade-offs are with using reflection vs. factory methods. But GoF gave examples in C++, and was published in 1994, before the reflection API was released with JDK 1.1 in I think 1997. It's entirely possible that using factory methods to customize the concrete types of objects doesn't make a lot of sense in Java, either.