Comment by MBCook

I always thought of it as a reaction to the “your program can throw anywhere for any reason due to an exception” nature of C++.

So they added checked exceptions. That way you can see that a function will only ever throw these two types of exceptions. Or maybe it never throws at all.

Of course a lot of people went really overboard early on creating a ton of different kinds of exceptions making everything a mess. Other people just got into the habit of using RuntimeExceptions for everything since they’re not checked, or the classic “throws Exception“ being added to the end of every method.

I tend to think it’s a good idea and useful. And I think a lot of people got a bad taste in their mouth early on. But if you’re going to have exceptions and you’re not going to give some better way of handling errors I think we’re probably better off than if there were no checked exceptions at all.