> I think twenty-five years ago there were similar hopes and dreams for Java checked exceptions.

Yeaaaaaaah. I remember being a very strong supporter of checked exceptions before I got into a giant codebase and saw how not having speced a sane exception type can cause lots of pain and some really long declarations or dropped exceptions.

   catch (Exception e) { throw new RuntimeError(e); } 

:(

You're right, I guess time will tell.