[davo11]

both these are outgrowths of C++ features - templates and rtti, which I saw first in the early 80's but were probably around earlier.

[BigZaphod]

I'm not sure when type-safe generics came on the scene (perhaps that was C++), but introspection/reflection has been around since Smalltalk at least.

[wheels]

Wikipedia says Ada:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming#Generics_in...