If you use try-with-resources in Java 7, you don't need to write any exception handling. The function would be '... throws IOException'. That seems to satisfy

If you use try-with-resources in Java 7, you don't need to write any exception handling. The function would be '... throws IOException'. That seems to satisfy the "think of disk/network failure as a very common case" design goal with minimal boilerplate. That brings up a separate discussion on checked vs unchecked exceptions, but I guess we can save that one for comparisons against a language with unchecked exceptions!