> Like async, the biggest problem with exceptions were the ergonomics.

I know it's not a popular take, but I prefer the idea of Checked Exceptions over unchecked ones [0], and suspect current opinions would be vastly different if Java had shipped with some sweet syntactic sugar for: "If an exception that is of kind A or B or C occurs, automatically throw another checked exception X with the original exception as a cause."

> Ex: If I'm writing a tool to try to analyze and recommend music that has to handle multiple different file types, I might catch an MP3 library's Mp3TagCorruptException and wrap it into my own FileFormatException.

This would reduce the temptation for developers to ruin the type-safety characteristics by wrapping everything in a RuntimeException just to get the ticket out the door.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946597

The problem with Java's checked exceptions is that it has too many kinds of exceptions to choose from and they're overly specific. Compare with Go, which has a single error interface and had it from the beginning, so it's used everywhere. Returning a new kind of error is always a local change, unless it's a function that didn't previously report errors at all.

Type systems permit either standardization or fragmentation and that's an ecosystem issue. Another example is that a language without a strong consensus on which string type to use will result in a fragmented ecosystem when each library goes its own way.