The developers of RText, a pure Java programmers text editor have split out the syntax highlighting component of their text editor into it's own project: RSyntaxTextArea. This component seems to be very mature, and extensible. Also appears to be pretty easy to add new languages to the editor; either provide a JFlex lexer or code one my hand.

Author talks about experience learning Python by writing a compiler and interpreter for a simple language.

Scala, the statically typed functional and object oriented language that runs on the JVM, is getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere these days. What few people know is that Scala is a direct descendant of Standard ML (SML). SML is the current version of a unique functional language created in the 1970's: ML. ML was a language created by Robin Milner (of Hindley-Milner type inference fame) to implement an automatic theorem proving system.