You're conflating types with the encoding/decoding problem. Maybe your paying jobs didn't provide you with enough room to distinguish between these two problems. Types can be encoded optimally with a minimally-required bits representation (for instance: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/flat), or they can be encoded redundantly with all default/recovery/omission information, and what you actually do with that encoding on the wire in a distributed system with or without versioning is up to you and it doesn't depend on the specific type system of your language, but the strong type system offers you unmatched precision both at program boundaries where encoding happens, and in business logic. Once you've got that `Maybe a` you can (<$>) in exactly one place at the program's boundary, and then proceed as if your data has always been provided without omission. And then you can combine (<$>) with `Alternative f` to deal with your distributed systems' silly payloads in a versioned manner. What's your dynamic language's null-checking equivalent for it?