[PySlice]

To me, checked exceptions seem to be a second return value: you need to catch it or declare that you are going to pass it to the caller. In this sense, it is enforced by the compiler even more rigidly than the return values themselves. They can be useful.

OTOH, sometimes we need a "panic"(¹) function, and a main loop that catches everything and either communicates the error to the user, or restarts the whole thing. That's why unchecked exceptions can be useful too, especially since they makes it harder to ignore errors - who has the patience required to check every return value of printf in C?

(¹) No, I've never programmed in Go.