Ahem. Templates were proposed for C++ in 1990, STL was developed in 1993, and Java was publicly announced by Sun in 1995.

Java's classes like Vector are a type-unsafe, limited set of containers (for example, they can contain Object, but not int). I suspect they were a hack that came about because Java lacked templates. Now Java 5.0 has a version of templated containers at last.

Back on the subject of perl metaprogramming, it could be done if desired. You can create code templates to be evaled at runtime. The Template toolkits are sometimes used this way. Also Inline::C and friends can generate wrapper code at runtime and call it.