...I know that he has very much disdain to C++ Templates. From a Smalltalkers perspective, templates are just an attempt to capture dynamic message binding. [link|http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/notes/smalltalk.html|Collections in Smalltalk] are infinitely easier to use than Templates in C++ - they are just objects that answer messages like everything else.

Personally, I like the idea of Parametric Genericity as strived for by C++ Templates, but I like them much better in ML and it's HM type inference. C++ Templates have some interesting properties from both a compile time and run time perspective, with some impressive libraries like Boost. But it's still complex to use them (just like everything else in C++). And no matter how you dress up C++, there's no subset of the language that can be used to provide type-safety.