1: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Class...

2: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/refle...

The exception I'd make to that is meta-programming—especially for ORM libraries—where responds to, perform, and lambdas together produce some lovely patterns to marry a schematic to a dynamically generated object hierarchy.

No, static methods do not count.

Imagine my surprise when I disovered Delphi has class methods too, but they were not copied to C#. I guess most of the time they're not particularly useful, but when you do need to create some factory code, having pure virtual class methods (template methods), is really useful.

Downside w/ Delphi is the metaclasses do not implicitly exist - you have to manually define it, eg TMyObjectClass = class of TMyObject; They should just be implicity, when you define a class, the metaclass is defined too. I guess when they first designed it memory constraints were still a consideration

Class-side methods in Smalltalk are inherited, working with classes (as an object) is analogous to how instance-side methods work with instances (also objects). So e.g implementing and using factory methods are simpler in Smalltalk and similar languages.

Edit: grammer and typos.

Smalltalk to be precise.