I really don't know where people get on this high horse and imagine that there's been some kind of fighting attitude here. I saw a talk by James Gosling (of Ja

I really don't know where people get on this high horse and imagine that there's been some kind of fighting attitude here. I saw a talk by James Gosling (of Java fame) a few months ago in which he said one of the most important things he's glad he did throughout the development of the language is "Decide... not to decide". The purpose of this "deciding not to decide" should sound familiar by now: once you commit to something, it's hard to backtrack. And once it's hard to backtrack, you have lost your ability to look for more optimal solutions than the one you've fixated on. This is why generics in Java took so long. And to this day, the developers of those generics do not regret taking their time to do so. I think that's interesting to note, don't you? It's okay to make decisions after deliberation. Deliberation does not imply a fight. --- Tone police aside, did you... read... the proposals? I don't think it's correct to dismissively say that the proposed handle/check syntax is identical to other checked exception syntaxes; it doesn't compose in the same way as traditional try-catch blocks; and it doesn't have the power to create arbitrary longjumps across multiple stack frames as exceptions do. In short, it's very little like traditional exceptions at all.