Checked exceptions are great in some cases. They are huge annoyance in others. The complaint is that the language does not provide tools to separate these cases - you can't just say "this method doesn't handle exceptions, pass it up" or "ok, now I want all exceptions to be handled, so tell me if I forgot something". It does not give the programmer control. Java has excellent facilities to make it happen - annotation, static analysis tools, extensive array of code checkers - but all this has to bow to the built-in mechanism which is crude and inflexible.