[salmonellaeater]

You DO need special compiler support for Maybe! Specifically, you need algebraic types. Consider Java. There is no pattern matching and no syntactic construct to decompose algebraic types. So an Option has to be cast to Some before extracting its value, risking a ClassCastException if the Option was actually a None. This is just as bad as having nulls, since programmers will just cast without looking.

[tikhonj]

My point was that you do not need to support Maybe explicitly. Instead, it naturally flows from significantly more general language features; Maybe itself is just a normal type built with these features.

Following your argument, we need special language support for any sort of abstraction, because everything has to be built in terms of some built-in language features at some point.

Also, on a largely unrelated note, I think that there is no reason for modern languages not to have sum types in this day and age. (cough Golang cough)

[Peaker]

Alternatively, you could implement Maybe in Java safely using the visitor pattern. Cumbersome, but it can work.