The funny thing is, in almost any discussion about exception handling in Java, I hear the opposite complaint - too many APIs throw checked exceptions. I've been leaning more and more to liking it when APIs force consumers to at least be aware of known error conditions.

Scala's Option type is another example of this - I've watched people be sort of annoyed by it at first, but it tends to really improve the reliability and overall quality of the code when it is used properly.