[lomnakkus]

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "first level" support.

For example, the T|Null thing doesn't give you code composability of the type monad transformers do -- at least as far as I understand it[1]. (I'm sure there are other things, but that's the first thing that popped into my head.)

FTR, I am a typed-FP weenie, but I still find Ceylon quite interesting, though I haven't done anything non-trivial in it yet.

[1] I still haven't fully understood the (experimental) HKT support, so maybe that can accomodate this?

[randomThoughts9]

There are some places where monad composability would improve your code but in general, at least the way I see it, you can replace a scala for comprehension with a set of IF statements, each IF eliminating a wrong value (null, exception, etc). Not to mention that you can have as many options as you like (A|B|C|D|E), whereas the mentioned monads must be composed in order to capture the same thing.

But it's true I never built a big ceylon project, so I can't say I know how that works out in practice.