My comment was actually made with many of these issues in mind -- I was trying to avoid needless nitpicking by being a bit vague. Perhaps that was a mistake. T

My comment was actually made with many of these issues in mind -- I was trying to avoid needless nitpicking by being a bit vague. Perhaps that was a mistake. The point wasn't that these things couldn't be solved -- they could, at least in theory[0] -- but that the current practical limitations of Java[1] are such that the interaction of higher-order functions and checked exceptions make checked exceptions a really bad idea. [0] At least I think so... given anonymous or adhoc sum types, etc. [1] Interestingly, this is not a JVM-wide issue. It's just the Java compiler that imposes these restrictions, for example: You cannot "catch" a checked exception which hasn't been declared at least one method in the "try" scope. This makes sense at first glance ("cannot happen"), but means that re-wrapping by higher-order functions must entail extremely error-prone inspection of any exception by calling code, etc. etc. It's a huge mess.