Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> Java is a great language because it's boring [...] Types are assertions we make about the world

This is less of a mind-was-changed case and more just controversial, but... Checked Exceptions were a fundamentally good idea. They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling.

In brief for non-Java folks: Checked Exceptions are a subset of all Exceptions. To throw them, they must be part of the function's type signature. To call that function, the caller code must make some kind of decision about what to do when that Checked Exception arrives. [0] It's basically another return type for the method, married with the conventions and flow-control features of Exceptions.

[0] Ex: Let it bubble up unimpeded, adding it to your own function signature; catch it and wrap it in your own exception with a type more appropriate to the layer of abstraction; catch it and log it; catch it and ignore it... Alas, many caught it and wrapped it in a generic RuntimeException.

> They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling.

Syntactic sugar it needs is an easy way (like ! prefix) to turn it to a runtime exception.

Procrastinating on exceptions is usually the correct thing to do in your typical business application - crash the current business transaction, log the error, return error response. Not much else to do.

Instead the applications are now littered with layers of try-catch-rethrow (optionally with redundant logging and wrapping into other useless exceptions) which add no benefit.

The try/catch/rethrow model can easily be substituted by just adding a `throws` to the method. If you truly don't care, just make your method `throws Exception` or even `throws Throwable` and let the automatic bubbling take care of making you handle exceptions at top level.