The ideas behind templates are brilliant but, yes, as implemented in an already big & complex language they seem like a kludge. But if you designed a low-level systems language from scratch with clean generics as a top priority I think you could come up with something pretty interesting and a lot simpler than the OO mismash you tend to get with C++.

Think of something like OCaml but with a less intrusive runtime, for instance. C++ got a lot more functional with C++11 but there's too much baggage for the simpler statically polymorphic language inside C++ to emerge cleanly.

I disagree, templates in C++ are great! Just make sure you declare all the code (both declarations and definitions) in a header file, and it should work fine.

I agree absolutely: templates are only just a little less crappy than preprocessor magic. I personally never use them.