You can't really use Maybe like in Haskell without a static type system. After all, in Python, there is no actual Null-pointer exceptions; instead, you have Ty

You can't really use Maybe like in Haskell without a static type system. After all, in Python, there is no actual Null-pointer exceptions; instead, you have TypeErrors that just happen to trigger on None. Even if you had some sort of option type, you would still get runtime errors because there is not enough information to deal with them at compile time. Now, you could add some sort of abstractions to make checking for None in your code easier. But when your "benevolent" dictator hates folds, you're not getting any advanced features like monads any time soon!