I think there's a point to be made here about how checked exceptions interact with java's type system. FileNotFoundException is a pretty great checked exception

I think there's a point to be made here about how checked exceptions interact with java's type system. FileNotFoundException is a pretty great checked exception - it's concrete enough that the caller actually has a chance of doing something useful in response. But most of the java standard library is designed with rather abstract APIs. Take java.io.Reader - it represents an arbitrary input source, so the Reader.read() method is declared to throw the very generic IOException. The subclasses don't make these any more concrete, leading to absurdities like StringReader.read() having a checked IOException.