I'm a C++ programmer and I wish I had checked exceptions. Checked exceptions are really equivalent to an either monad, except that they look better in imperative code, especially if you lack some sort of 'do' notation.

What Java lacks is a) enough compile time abstraction capabilities to inspect and parametrize exception specifications so that application specific exceptions can be forwarded through generic/framework code and b) a way to defer the checking to runtime (possibly via a special annotation) so that there would be no reason to ever write empty catch blocks.