[marginalia_nu]

Java's stated design philosophy since way back is to let other languages experiment and then incorporate what appears to work out, thus being able to maintain an append-only change philosophy where everything is always backwards compatible. Kotlin is undeniably a source of inspiration, as is many other languages.

(This doesn't always work out, some bad API decisions[1] will likely haunt Java forever, some features are arguably a bit undercooked (e.g. exception handling in Stream:s), but given the constraints it's kind of remarkable how well it does work)

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21410683/boolean-getbool...

[vbezhenar]

Checked exceptions themselves to me looks like an experiment which had no place in Java. I don't know language landscape in 1990, may be it looked like a good idea back then. But today: C++, JavaScript, Python, C# are few of the most popular languages which use unchecked exceptions.

May be one day Java will just retire this concept and make all exceptions unchecked. It'll be backwards-compatible change. Make `throws` clause cause deprecation warnings and that's about it.

[lolinder]

Checked exceptions are an unfortunate case of a feature being rolled out in a language that wasn't ready to support it ergonomically and then becoming a pariah because of how bad the experience was in that language. There's nothing wrong with the concept—checked exceptions are conceptually the same as every function returning a Result type—but without type inference and without some ergonomics like Rust's ? operator they're really hard to work with and so people grew to hate them.

I personally believe that it is now within reach for Java to fix checked exceptions to be ergonomic and useful. If they do it, Java could have one of the best error handling paradigms out of any modern language, but I suspect it won't happen because the community has come to land so firmly against checked exceptions.

[lenkite]

Making big feature and possibly breaking changes such as making checked exceptions ergonomic would only be possible if the original language designer - James Gosling decided to dust his sleeves, un-retire himself and lead the job. Now, its a distant pipe dream.

[kaba0]

That’s true. But why would Java take inspiration from Kotlin, which adds very little new to the picture (scala has done basically everything before, let alone ML, from where most of the new features java (or any other modern language) copies originate from)