Nice Maybe implementation! The thing that you miss out on with that particular style of implementation, though, is that you don't get certain higher-order functions for free. For example, if you were to endow your Maybe implementation with a "GetEnumerator" method, then you would get all of the other LINQ methods for free (at the expense for losing your "Maybe"-ness as its static type is transmogrified into a vanilla IEnumerable). With higher-kinded types, you could potentially gain a whole host of methods for free that would, in contrast to LINQ, return a Maybe<T> instead of just an IEnumerable<T>, but you would still just need to provide a small handful of manually-implemented methods (e.g., Select, SelectMany, Where, etc.).