Comment by sjrd
3 days ago
Or Scala. Or Kotlin. Or any of the other languages that had most of these features years if not decades before Java. ;)
3 days ago
Or Scala. Or Kotlin. Or any of the other languages that had most of these features years if not decades before Java. ;)
Yeah that's very much an explicit design philosophy of Java, dating way back. Let other languages experiment, and adapt what proves useful.
It hasn't worked out in terms of delivering perfect language design, but it has worked out in the sense that Java has an almost absurd degree of backward compatibility. There are libraries that have had more breaking changes this year than the Java programming language has had in the last 17 releases.
What other language made them think checked exceptions were a good idea?
They are a good idea. They solve the problem that you don't know where an exception is coming from (the "invisible control flow" complaint), and let the compiler help you to avoid mistakes when refactoring. There is zero valid reason to hate on checked exceptions.
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Some inspiration came from C++, Modula-3, CLU etc. (note, inspiration, not validation of the idea)
They exist since v1, which had very different philosophy than Java of 2010s-2020s. 1990s were an interesting time in language design and software engineering. People started reflecting on the previous experiences of building software and trying to figure out how to build better, faster, with higher quality. At that time checked exceptions were untested idea: it felt wrong not to have them based on previous experience with exceptions in C++ codebases, but there were no serious arguments against them.
They are a good idea. Checked errors are so important for correctness. HN’s darling Rust exclusively uses checked errors.
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I assume it was the other way around, a slight twist to exceptions, only enforced by the compiler (the JVM doesn't care about checked/unchecked) probably seemed a cheap and reasonable way to implement explicit error handling. Given that Java ergonomics of the time didn't offer any convenient and performant way to return multiple values instead.
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Checked exceptions are a good idea.