You misrepresent history: Stepanov implemented STL first in Lisp, then in Ada. Both were manifestly inadequate. Stepanov openly despised "OO gook", and lamented

You misrepresent history: Stepanov implemented STL first in Lisp, then in Ada. Both were manifestly inadequate. Stepanov openly despised "OO gook", and lamented that "begin", "end", and operators ++ and * had to be class members until partial specialization finally made that unnecessary. (Now we have std::begin and end.) Partial specialization was added to C++ specifically to make STL more practical. C++ proved adequate. But C++ compilers of the time were not; all of them needed massive improvement to usefully build programs that used STL. (It took many years for Microsoft to get there; STL implementations obliged to work under Microsoft compilers were badly crippled until after C++11 came out.) But no other language was up to the job. Bjarne did not motivate porting it to C++; the language did. Bjarne helped, but Andrew Koenig might have helped more.