As I was thinking about this some more, checked exceptions start looking like explicit typing. The reason people want checked exceptions is to make sure that no error conditions go unprocessed. Same thing that explicit typing people want. But let's apply the testing argument. If your testcases actually tested the relevant error conditions, then you wouldn't need to have a language mechanism to ensure that the errors got handled. At least, you could make all exceptions unchecked, and eliminate the multi-arm catch hairballs that are lying around. It's not like all those catch blocks that are empty, printing stacktraces, or logging exceptions are really improving the robustness of the systems that they are in.