Josh Bloch has always been my favorite deity in the Java pantheon. He's never said or written anything that I didn't find shockingly reasonable. He's one of the few folks willing to get up and talk in pragmatic terms about the importance of good API design. He believes the compiler is his friend. He wants to help the compiler be your friend as well.

And to top it all off, he admits mistakes. At this year's 'puzzlers' quiz at JavaOne last week, he paused to offer everyone a big mea culpa for a design decision he made which later turned out to be wrong.*

How often do you see a THOUGHT LEADER do that? And in front of thousands of people, no less? I'm a fan for life.

* The mistake was that java.util.Arrays.asList() was updated to take varargs. This means it's now ok to pass an array of primitives to asList, but you will get a (perhaps) astonishing result: a List containing a single entry (your array of primitives).