Here's a comprehensive summary of the article on generic programming:

Generic programming is a computer programming style where algorithms are written using data types that are specified later, significantly reducing duplicate code by allowing common functions to operate on various types. This approach originated with the ML language in 1973, gaining mainstream adoption with Ada in 1977 and becoming a core feature of C++ library design through templates. Its techniques were further developed by influential works like the 1994 book Design Patterns and Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design (2001). Many modern languages, including Java, C#, and Python, implement this concept as "generics," while others like Haskell refer to it as "parametric polymorphism."

David Musser and Alexander Stepanov defined a more specific "generic programming" paradigm, exemplified by the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), which abstracts fundamental requirements on data types into "concepts." The STL's iterator theory, for instance, decouples sequence data structures from algorithms operating on them, efficiently replacing N×M direct implementations with just N+M combinations. This concept-based approach ensures computational complexity requirements are an explicit part of the design, leading to highly optimized and reusable code.