[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)