Exceptions are not meant to be handled where they occur, that's why they unroll the stack. For the most part, you can't recover from an exception -- you just abort whatever you're doing, print an error message, and let the user try something else. Checked exceptions cause developers to re-interpret the exceptions or just swallow them -- neither is a benefit.
Exactly. If the database server blew up, there's nothing my program can do. I could try reconnecting, and some libraries do, but that doesn't usually help anything. Once the server is back up, the Fibonacci (or exponential) back-off is so high that's it's faster to just restart the program manually. So usually, dying is easier for everyone.
