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by nine_k
762 days ago
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The question was, why checked exceptions saw no love. A big part of the answer is that the stdlib did a very poor job showcasing them. No wonder, it was an attempt to graft an FP-esque feature onto a deeply imperative OOP language, with a development team aligned with OOP concepts. I suspect the stdlib team lacked either the understanding or the means to make the use of e.g. IOException nicer. They didn't even have type parameters at their disposal yet. It was botched as a result, and deprecated. It's an interesting mental exercise to try and design a better implementation of the idea within the constraints of Java. (Implementing the monadic approach is likely the easiest and cleanest way.) |
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Fair enough. I can see that interpretation. I was more focused on their first sentence, which said: "On top of all the other problems pointed out, java's checked exceptions don't even do a good job of indicating possible failure conditions." Then it felt like they were backing that claim by citing a specific example that's just a poor use of the feature.
> No wonder, it was an attempt to graft an FP-esque feature onto a deeply imperative OOP language, with a development team aligned with OOP concepts.
That's an interesting take that I hadn't really heard before or considered myself. I had assumed that it came from some frustration around C++ exceptions and not knowing what was supposed to be handled vs not.
But, in any case, I do agree that the feature ended up rejected by the larger programming community largely because of Java's specific implementation of it.
Though, I have to say that I think it might have ended up rejected even if Java did a perfect job of it in the standard library. The truth is that most programmers don't seem to understand the intended design of the feature and feel like there's a binary choice between using checked exceptions or unchecked exceptions. The Oracle documentation does a very good job, IMO, of explaining the feature, how it's intended to be used, and how do decide whether to use an unchecked exception or a checked one. But, I don't think most people actually read manuals/books to learn programming languages anymore.