I love checking in with this slide deck from time to time.
I'm not a language nerd by any means, but I wonder how much of the reliability issues are now "solved". It seems that Scala would do a lot of what is required, if only checked exceptions were enabled (why the Scala compiler doesn't have this as a compiler flag, I don't know). I understand why the author wants his static compilation cake, but sometimes sucking down some syntax for practicality/doing stuff now might be OK ;)
Checked exceptions, at least the way Java does them are exceedingly verbose, potentially requiring a try/catch block at every level of a call stack. I think it would be possible do static analysis of most possible execution paths and determine whether there's a possible exception not being caught by a certain level without having to deal with it in every call.
This is relatively trivial, but only for whole-program compilation. The good thing about declaring exceptions on functions is that you can partially compile programs without a module system - otherwise, at a minimum you have to declare them at module boundaries.
I'm not a language nerd by any means, but I wonder how much of the reliability issues are now "solved". It seems that Scala would do a lot of what is required, if only checked exceptions were enabled (why the Scala compiler doesn't have this as a compiler flag, I don't know). I understand why the author wants his static compilation cake, but sometimes sucking down some syntax for practicality/doing stuff now might be OK ;)