Working with a Maybe isn't that much better than working with a type that might be null in Java, C#, or C++. You do have to go slightly farther out of your way

Working with a Maybe isn't that much better than working with a type that might be null in Java, C#, or C++. You do have to go slightly farther out of your way to be "bad" and ignore the Nothing case, but not much -- you could wrap all your Maybe values with fromJust and turn them into exceptions as you suggest. The real benefit is the ability to have things that aren't Maybe. I would say that in any language, most functions don't have meaningful answers for null inputs (especially when you count the 'this' object input in object oriented languages). Most functions also don't produce nullable results. Yet, in C# or Java, reference types could always be null. The cases where that nullability is a real possibility that you need to handle are difficult to identify. Having nullability be opt-in with Maybe, rather than an inescapable part of all reference types, lets you leave worrying about handling the null case to the typically smaller amount of times where it can actually meaningfully occur. Hopefully that makes doing the handling correctly more likely.