The 'failing' of checked exceptions comes from essentially being forced to couple the type signatures of your methods' successful results with their error results. A more explicit way to do this is with Optional/Either types, and now you don't need the checked exceptions feature nor need to get people to remember to check for a global errno or some other data convention like an empty string / null. There's a lot of boilerplate though, just like with checked exceptions.
I prefer a more decoupled/late-binding approach to error handling; so far Common Lisp does it the best I've seen.[0] The key insight CL people had was that often in the face of an error, you need help from somewhere away from your local context to figure out how to resolve it, but then for many cases, you want to return back to where the error has occurred and take the resolution path with your local context. In other languages that automatically unwind the stack to the exception handler, it's too late.
I prefer a more decoupled/late-binding approach to error handling; so far Common Lisp does it the best I've seen.[0] The key insight CL people had was that often in the face of an error, you need help from somewhere away from your local context to figure out how to resolve it, but then for many cases, you want to return back to where the error has occurred and take the resolution path with your local context. In other languages that automatically unwind the stack to the exception handler, it's too late.
[0] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...