The ergonomics of checked exceptions may be debatable but compared to golangs explicit error handling at essentially each function call is definitely worse.

Yeah, I've got a lot of Java experience and a wee bit of Go language experience and I agree with you. I like Go in almost every way except for it's error handling. It's just wrong to have to check every goddam function one by one

I guess that's the reason why most Java programs I use cannot do proper user-facing error messages. Because it is so easy to just ignore error handling. The exception will be caught by the top-level, right? This is how almost every Java cli tool prints a stacktrace on even most trivial user errors like file not found.

Having to deal with errors and forcing the developer to do proper error handling is a good thing.

I don't mind Go's errors. I do mind the complete lack of hierarchy in that. Java's exceptions are hierarchical. I can create an exception that specializes from `IOException` and that I feel is really powerful. Go added this half-baked and much later. So, most FOSS libraries don't support it yet.

Both Java checked and unchecked exceptions are inferior to signaling errors by return values like Go/Rust/Haskell do.

Exceptions are not composable, cannot be generic, and it is not visible in the source code which lines can throw, so every line is a potential branching point.