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.

I've pretty much been stuck on java since 1995, I started right around 1.0. There have been some stints of Python or we have some glue code in C/C++ or whatever but we're talking 95% java.

Some of these things are mildly annoying when you think about them in theoretical terms.

But all the professional teams I've been on a (a lot) have successfully dealt with exceptions without issue. The teams settled on an exception and error handling process early in the design phase and it rarely has caused a major issue.

Yet it seems out on the internet in any place where programming languages are discussed it is an insurmountable problem that has caused all projects in Java to fail and the language died an early and unpopular death. It seems if it caused anyone huge problems it was not Java's issue but that team's issue.

There are/were other much bigger issues over the years. Memory leaks have been issues. Spring was hard for many people to deal with back around 2005 or so. The first iterations were quite bad with XML. XML in general caused a lot of issues. J2EE caused a lot of issues just because it was so badly designed early on. (Some of this was because it was birthed out of CORBA, which was itself pretty horrible.) Plenty of issues were caused by using Collections with mixed objects in them early on before Generics were introduced. Visual J++ caused havoc. Different models of web application caused a lot of havoc before we got to Javascript UIs in the browser driven by Web API back ends. JPA was a big mistake IMO. But exceptions were never really a huge problem anywhere.

So many have blamed a problem on Java when it was actually a problem with a library, component, or framework written in Java that became way more popular than it should have been. And along the way there were a lot of "developer influencer celebrities" who were listened too far far more than they should have been. Many of these guys (I can't remember one ever being a woman) sold everyone on ultra complex designs and ways of doing things and the community almost always bought in to a ridiculous degree.