Software Reuse

There is an old saying in the nootropic (mental-performance enhancing drug) community:

"The guys in the 60's had this truly brilliant idea of using drugs to expand conciousness and improve thinking. Unfortunately, all they had at the time was LSD." [Just to ensure proper context, this is said without sarcasm. It really was a good idea, however LSD turned out to be a complete flop in achieving this goal.]

I've recently been doing some work that involved C++ templates, so allow me to reword this for modern usage:

"The c++ guys in the 90's had this truly brilliant idea of direct language support for generic code and module reuse. Unfortunately, all they had at the time was c++ templates."