[nostrademons]

For a lot of scripts you want the program to crash with a stack trace if you get an IOException, which is the default behavior if it's uncaught. The user is the developer, and if there's an error the developer fixes it by munging something on their filesystem.

Java was designed for "production" software, which in the late 90s and early 00s meant software that ran for long periods of time as a server, servicing thousands of mission-critical customers. Crashing was not acceptable behavior for that. But now a lot of production software often requires a lot of ancillary one-off tasks that are just done by the developers - testing, data-munging, exploratory code, migrations, demos, etc. That's a very different environment from where you code to spec, the spec never changes, and once the software is done it's supposed to run for years without crashing.

[erik_seaberg]

Early Java was designed for set-top boxes and then web browsers. Large-scale servers came later; in fact a lot of libraries still don't support the async futures that were officially added five years ago.