The problem there was really that Java confused unrecoverable errors with recoverable errors. NPEs and divide by zero should make the program abort (possibly w

The problem there was really that Java confused unrecoverable errors with recoverable errors. NPEs and divide by zero should make the program abort (possibly with another, completely different mechanism to catch these if you really want to, a la Rust's panic handlers). Recoverable errors should all be checked exceptions, and a part of each function's type signature. This would still be a huge pain to deal with, though, with the existing syntax.