[rictic]

It's a pain that operations can fail, but handling state when they do fail is a problem that exists whether your exceptions are checked or unchecked. Forcing all exceptions to be checked doesn't seem to help with the problem, but would rather cause a lot of code to simply declare that it throws Exception, rather than listing off all possible exception types that it doesn't handle (e.g. out of memory, SIGTERM received, SIGINT received, etc)

[pifflesnort]

Failure types are generally classifiable; part of clean module design is in classifying your exceptions in a way that allows you to declare that a more or less granular exception types are thrown based on the actual failure mode(s) possible from your code.

The 'throws Exception' behavior only emerges when people don't take the time to define how code can fail, which is something that is necessary to fully define an interface, regardless of whether or not you have language support for declaring failure modes.

[pswenson]

Given that most code degrades into either wrapping checked exceptions into runtime exceptions or most methods having "throws Exception" declared...I think it's safe to say Checked Exceptions don't work well in the real world. There is a reason no other language created in computer history uses them.

[pifflesnort]

> Given that most code degrades into either wrapping checked exceptions into runtime exceptions ...

This is a self-referential argument; people who are disinclined to take the time to define how code fails are disinclined to define how code fails.

The code can still fail, the failure cases still must be defined, but now the compiler won't warn them that they've failed to do so, and the result is that the failure cases are undefined and unknown, and the code is less reliable.

Without defining failure modes, the system is always in an unknown state: any undefined failure will leave any any stateful code in an unknown state. Since failure modes must be defined, either in code, or in documentation, and writing documentation takes longer, and it must be maintained (and read) manually.

Since defining failure modes manually takes more effort than using the compiler's support for checked exceptions, the reality is that unchecked exception advocates are really arguing for not defining failure modes at all; this is simply laziness.

> There is a reason no other language created in computer history uses them.

Many languages simply don't use exceptions at all, since having what amounts to an 'atomic goto' isn't necessarily considered an advantageous feature. Not using exceptions is the only choice that doesn't introduce a significant likelihood of program failure due to littering code bases with what amount to unchecked stack unwinding gotos.

That said, your statement is not really correct. Languages like Haskell provide checked exceptions via library features. C++ has an optional checked exception mechanism, but they aren't enforced at compile-time (unfortunately).

[brown9-2]

Forcing all exceptions to be checked doesn't seem to help with the problem

I think this is a common misperception of Java - not all exceptions needed to be checked exceptions. The author makes a decision when defining the Exception class if it is going to be a checked exception or unchecked exception.