All developers are familiar with (and mostly loathe) "boilerplate", but have you ever thought about where the word comes from and what code and boilers have in common?
In the late 1800s, boilers were made from thick, standardised, rolled steel sheets. These sheets were known as "boiler plates".
Around the same time, newspapers were all the rage. Printing presses produced thousands of pages per hour, and newspapers (literally?) flew off the presses.
--
Image: Sky via Unsplash
Someone thought these steel printing plates resembled the plates used to create boilers and they came to be known in the printing industry as "boiler plates".
Quite naturally, the text on the plates became known as "boilerplate text" and nowadays we use the word "boilerplate" for any kind of reusable piece of content—though, whereas "boilerplate text" is usually reused verbatim, "boilerplate code" often varies a bit between projects, making it a bit of a misnomer!
@mspcommentary They're both standardised and made of steel - people make analogies all the time :)
But don't take my word for it, here are a few other sources that say the same thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_text#Etymology
https://www.etymonline.com/word/boilerplate
https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/words/why-does-boilerplate-mean-standard
https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/10/boilerplate.html
Raniz
Mike Anderson