As software engineers we use package managers on a daily basis. We use them to install dependencies we need to run and build software we write. Probably every software engineer can relate to the frustration that will eventually arise from using these package managers. Sometimes packages that seem to work on your colleagues machine just fine, are broken on yours. Even though package managers have improved substantially over time, issues like these still arise. Maybe there is some fundamental design flaw in the way we approach package management. There is a package manager that tries to do things different and it is called Nix. Let’s take a look at what Nix is and how you can use it on your machine today.

Checked exceptions were an effort by the designers of Java to express the possibility of failure in the type signature, aiding users of these methods in handling the failure scenario gracefully. While the intentions of the design were noble, the end result did not pan out as expected. Most Java programmers have dropped checked exceptions in favor of their unchecked counterparts. Contemporary Java allows us to express failure in the type signature in new and better ways. In this post I’ll explain why checked exceptions have fallen out of favor and what better approach there is to expressing the possibility of failure.