Being a mechanical engineer by training, I always assumed it had come from the requirement that all boilers must have a nameplate affixed with a bunch of not really useful information about how it was tested. The hot water heater in your house has a boiler nameplate, and nuclear power plants have a "nameplate" rated capacity:
1. Usually as two words. A plate or sheet of metal of suitable thickness and strength to be used in constructing the shell of a boiler. Also as mass noun: metal in the form of such plates. Cf. boiler-iron n. at boiler n. Compounds 2.
1793 Star 13 Nov. (advt.) Table of the number and dimensions of Boiler Plates and weights thereof, suitable for Boilers, from eight to sixteen feet and a half diameter.
1860 D. K. Clark & Z. Colburn Recent Pract. Locomotive Engine i. i. 1/1 The earliest recorded trials of the strength of boiler-plate, are those of Mr. Fairbairn, made in 1838.
1874 J. H. Collins Princ. Metal Mining (1875) xiii. 74 The kibble is simply an iron bucket made of boiler plates, riveted together.
1915 J. Wedgwood With Machine-guns in Gallipoli i. 4 Our mechanics..lined her bridges with boiler plate and leaky sand-bags.
Yea, that's interesting, but I still bet this is likely a case of no one seriously looking into this term and knowing the full lexical space that well.
Boilerplate's early use was referring to boiler material, but it likely got semantically mixed together with the term for "standard form plate affixed to a boiler", as this term is actually more from the legal industry where it's literally a document with blanks you fill out, which more closely fits this definition.
I think people have looked into it and produced the most likely explanation. The name plate thing is a fun kind of 'folk etymology' theory but isn't supported by any evidence at all beside the hunches of people who've been around boilers. The other variant has a wealth of evidence supporting it.
They don't but it explains why pre-set/cast type plates that were sent ready-made to newspapers were called 'boiler plate' which in turn explains the origin of 'boilerplate' a lot better than the nameplate thing.
This looks much more in line with programming boilerplate with literal fill-in-the blanks.
I would say the article captures early etymology but this could be why we call it boilerplate.
What I'd like to learn is the earliest computer related usage of the term. Wikipedia says[0]:
> The term arose from the newspaper business. Columns and other pieces that were distributed by print syndicates were sent to subscribing newspapers in the form of prepared printing plates. Because of their resemblance to the metal plates used in the making of boilers, they became known as "boiler plates", and their resulting text—"boilerplate text". As the stories that were distributed by boiler plates were usually "fillers" rather than "serious" news, the term became synonymous with unoriginal, repeated text.[2][3]
> A related term is bookkeeping code, referring to code that is not part of the business logic but is interleaved with it in order to keep data structures updated or handle secondary aspects of the program.
At a certain point, the slang term "boilerplate" branched away from the derogatory sense in reference to newspapers to the more neutral sense of formulaic. The first "neutral" sense reference in the OED is from 1949:
Navy Contract Law (U.S. Bureau Naval Personnel) ix. 212/2 -- "This type of clause has proved so valuable that it is presently standard ‘boilerplate’ not only in shipbuilding contracts but also in almost every kind of contract."
The first reference in the OED for it being used w/r/t computer stuff is 1990:
L. Wall & R. L. Schwartz Programming Perl vii. 379 -- "Like mus itself, man2mus is not 100% effective, but can save you a lot of time producing the initial boilerplate."
The actual man2mus program appears to be not accessible to the easily searchable public internet anymore, but there's a few references to it - "usub/man2mus A manual page to .mus translator". It's Perl, apparently.
The reference to "Programming Perl" was no doubt helped along by Perl developer Jesse Sheidlower who worked at the OED in the early 2000s. From his Wikipedia page: "Although not a computer programmer by training, Sheidlower introduced Perl to the North American offices of Oxford University Press and developed tools for data manipulation when no programmers were available. He is also one of the core developers of Catalyst, a popular Perl web development framework."
Assumptions are immaterial, however. Etymology of the term is as noted in the article. It is more likely that this use (as on water heaters and such) derives from the same typesetting usage.
It's always satisfying to be certain, but the meaning of words does shift over time, and sometimes words have multiple origins. Assuming that 70s or 80s programmers knew anything about printing presses is tenuous. Given the long assumption that boilerplate refers to plates on equipment and superior fit of "fill in the blank" documents, it seems more likely that this is the intended meaning. Perhaps the term was heard and misunderstood early on? But the proposed origin doesn't align with the community that's using it to refer to source code.
> Assuming that 70s or 80s programmers knew anything about printing presses is tenuous
True, but as you say the meaning of words shift. It is entirely plausible that they were exposed to the term in its bureaucratic meaning, and continued to use it without any connection to actual boilers - the same way we do today.
As to 70's and 80's programmers knowing about printing presses I'll point out that a significant early AI program (1968-1970) was named SHRDLU. One familiar with printing history might recognize those letters as part of the second column of moveable type characters on a Linotype machine (and other type-casting machines.) I didn't look up a reference, but I recall that the first row of bins for hand set hot type letters followed the same convention of letter frequency in English text (for english speaking countries that is.)
etaoin shrdlu
That string of characters became more well know due to its appearance in hot type set news papers of the era. The characters sometimes accidentally made it to press rather than being pulled as part of an erroneous line of text.
I remember asking my father in the 1980s what "boilerplate" meant, having encountered the term in a newspaper. He relayed it to me in the legal sense of the preliminary standard matter on a contract. He was a software developer starting in the 1960s so I have absolutely no doubt that the bureacratic usage was well known in those circles.
> Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,169 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history.
Additionally "boilerplate" was used in legal circles before the invention of the linotype ("boiler plate") machine, so the linked article is almost certainly wrong.
Not a mechanical engineer, but similar assumptions. Chances are the term wouldn't have become a fixture in software jargon without that folk etymology. I'm genuinely surprised that it's quite literally about copy/paste, and not about formalities at all!
I have only ever known boiler plate code as that kind of code that is needed to stitch things together, initialize libraries and so on. So not exactly copy/paste, but rather "formulaic" code that has not yet been deemed worthy of an abstraction
I believe the term came about in the early days of steam power when designers had a habit of “overcompensating” because boilers had a history of catastrophic and deadly failures. This lead to excessive and unnecessary overbuilding of the boiler walls which ironically made it MORE dangerous when it exploded.
1798, "method of printing from a plate," from French stéréotype (adj.) "printed by means of a solid plate of type," from Greek stereos "solid" (see stereo-) + French type "type" (see type (n.)). Meaning "a stereotype plate" is from 1817. Meaning "image perpetuated without change" is first recorded 1850, from the verb in this sense.
1825, "electrotype, stereotype," from French cliché, a technical word in printer's jargon for "stereotype block," noun use of past participle of clicher "to click" (18c.), supposedly echoic of the sound of a mold striking metal (compare native click).
I think the explanation of stereotype needs a bit of explanation to make sense.
In early printing, a plate would be assembled from individual letters of type before it was used for printing. However, it quickly became apparent that certain words or phrases were used a lot, so typesetters would create "a solid plate of type" for those words or phrases to speed up the typesetting process.
Nah, I think it refers to the fact that popular printing items, like the Bible or popular books that stayed in print more or less indefinitely would be stereotyped, that is an imprint of the pages would be taken, then a used as a mold to cast a plate that could be used while the type slugs could be re-used for something else.
A large part of the printing business was to print fill-in-the-blank business stationary, like orders, invoices, etc.
So a stereotype came to mean a standard form that you could adapt to whatever context by just changing a few details.
Indeed it may be surprising that "stereo sound" (and later analogues like "stereo vision") have nothing, etymologically, to do with having two channels; it was essentially introduced as a marketing term referring to the more "solid" or tangible sensory quality compared to single-channel sound.
I think stereo vision predates the usage in sound, and refers more to the 3D depth perception of shapes that it allows. Stereography was invented sometime in the mid 1800s [1]. Stereo sound similarly is meant to give a more realistic perception of sound in space compared to mono.
nit: type actually originates from the Greek word τύπος https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/τύπος (Google definition‘s origin based on oxford dict also confirms that).
What a neat little reference. I love finding out that someone, somewhere, has taken the time to put a little sticker on something and say "I think I'll call this idea X".
It's pretty not-dead for me, as there has been a recent trend to call out the notion of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" as a fantasy, in a similar vein as calling out the notion of being "self-made" as unlikely -- i.e., virtually everyone got where they are with some help, not by themselves.
Of course, the computer metaphor involves electronics that do, in fact, figure out how to start without external assistance, despite the human metaphor tending to be a myth!
I wonder if we could add "record scratch noise" into the dead metaphors category, or if we'd need to make a new category for audio relics instead of written ones.
I'd say that metaphor not quite dead yet. A few generations are younger than CDs, but vinyl still appears in a lot of pop culture (in no small part thanks to nostalgia). I'd wager most teens would know that the vinyl scratch sound is indeed from vinyl, even though most would never have touched a vinyl disc. Dead media, but the metaphor is still fresh enough...
It was a term used in printing presses for text/content that could be reused.
> "Boiler plate" originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers to heat water. Metal printing plates (type metal) used in hot metal typesetting of prepared text such as advertisements or syndicated columns were distributed to small, local newspapers, and became known as 'boilerplates' by analogy. One large supplier to newspapers of this kind of boilerplate was the Western Newspaper Union, which supplied "ready-to-print stories [which] contained national or international news" to papers with smaller geographic footprints, which could include advertisements pre-printed next to the conventional content.
The same can be true of boilerplate code, which in the same article is defined as
> the sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration
> The author says that because of boilerplate, “brains have been at a discount” and “the editorial needs have chiefly been a strong right arm and an axe”
It’s remarkable to see a sentiment that’s so common in the internet era showing up in 1894.
Today, you’d probably phrase it as ‘we’re in an attention economy due to boilerplate’ or ‘the signal to noise ratio is worse due to boilerplate’ or something (with modern ‘boilerplate’ being electronic rather than mechanical).
> It’s remarkable to see a sentiment that’s so common in the internet era showing up in 1894.
There is a famous ancient Greek quote, that AFAIK nobody can agree on the author with basically the same sentiment. The written word surely destroyed our civilization.
Socrates on writing (verbally, as Socrates famously didn't write anything himself):
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
It's a lot like what people say now about the internet, Google etc.
The passage appears in the Phaedrus, and has Socrates quoting an earlier Egyptian, Thamus:
SOCRATES: … Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. .... The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”
Note that this is actually Plato writing what many philosophers consider more a literary than literal work (see, e.g., Peter Adamson of The History of Philosophy podcast and book series), through his character Socrates, who then quotes another, so three levels of nested narrative and storytelling.
And while we're noting, "Plato" is itself believed a nickname or pseudonym, with his birth name likely being "Aristocles".
The socrates parallel has a different meaning that what caught my eye. I was struck less by the ‘lots of writing = bad’ parallel and more by the ‘lots of writing needs good filtering to find the signal in the noise.’
But now I’m realizing that might be me just coming at it from a modern angle, while the original 1894 author might have just meant ‘lots of writing = bad.’
"Boilerplate" also refers to the branding plates that were placed on boilers that contained repeated information on every boiler. I think it's more likely the term comes from that.
It's annoying the author isn't on twitter where this could be corrected!
Author here, looking into those earlier sources now
EDIT: The "Advisory Opinions" source is mislabeled and was published after 1989. [1] The "Typographic Journal" refers to boiler plate as a derogative for a low quality newspaper:
> The next city visited was Paris, Ill. which "supports" four newspapers. The only one worthy of mention is the Beacon … The other newspapers thive on "boiler plates" exclusively [2]
Agree "Advisory Opinions" was mislabeled. That's annoying.
My point about "Typographic Journal" is that their usage is quite different - they are using it as a synonym for low quality, not the kind of fill-in-the-blanks usage we see now.
In 1851 "De Bows Review"[1] talks about how it is a felony to use unstamped boiler-plate, conceal the plate on the boiler-plate or counterfeit the stamp. To me that goes to filling-in of boilerplate with details (using the stamp) which seems a more likely origin than the "lower quality" usage used by "Typographic Journal".
The origin of the term in spaceflight (according to the wiki, at least) is that they were literally constructing full-size / full-weight mock ups of capsules from steel:
"The term boilerplate originated from the use of boilerplate steel[3] for the construction of test articles/mock-ups. Historically, during the development of the Little Joe series of 7 launch vehicles, there was only one actual boilerplate capsule and it was called such since its conical section was made of steel at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. This capsule was used in a beach abort test, and then subsequently used in the LJ1A flight. However, the term subsequently came to be used for all the prototype capsules (which in their own right were nearly as complicated as the orbital capsules). This usage was technically incorrect, as those other capsules were not made of boilerplate, but the boilerplate term had effectively been genericized.[citation needed]"
In the 19th century, a boilerplate referred to a plate of steel used as a template in the construction of steam boilers. These standardized metal plates reminded editors of the often trite and unoriginal work that ad writers and others sometimes submitted for publication.
Without further research, my impression of where that term originated was in drafting contracts: The parts, like confidentiality, that are standardized and a component of most contracts, are the "boilerplate," in contrast with the parts, like a statement of work, that are specific to a particular contract. Did it jump from writing, in general, to legal contract drafting?
Okay. Glad your data backed analysis with the data you've shared (outside of your observations of mentally unstable individuals of course) has yielded that "Twitter _is_ on shaky ground".
That said, I can’t help but feel like this one premise is unsubstantiated.
> But where does it get the meaning of being “uncreative” copy-paste code?
I’ve never heard of boilerplate being described in quite those terms.
In my experience, boilerplate is frowned upon for exactly one reason: we tend to type it out manually despite the fact that it never differs. That’s something that coders know should be automated, and it’s a waste of energy when it’s not. The exact same problem linotype and boilerplate molds solved.
Perhaps I’m simply missing the point and splitting hairs.
I read a book on the American Civil War and the term 'boilerplate' was used often to describe how the Confederate Navy would reinforce barges and steamboats with boilerplate to convert them into military vessels. It was also used to construct an early submarine: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/underwater-archaeology...
But in that case they were literally using actual boiler plate, it wasn't a euphemism, as in the linked article the submarine was constructed out of boiler plate.
Why: Making any sort of thick, strong plate metal is seriously non-trivial, both in terms of the manufacturing facility required, and the metallurgical expertise to actually do it. The CSA had very little heavy industry compared to the Union. Boiler plate (widely used, in a steam-powered world) would be about the only armor-ish product that the CSA could manufacture for itself. (Similar for hull plates for a submarine - though boiler plate is far closer to the ideal material there.)
Now I'm curious how boiler plate is made. Can't find much - its all code stuff per google search. Seems like its just hot rolled steel plate to a certain thickness.
From vague memory, the two huge issues for armor plate (especially ~150 years ago) are:
- Having the extremely heavy equipment needed to roll very thick plates. ~Nothing except warship armor was anything resembling that thick, for such equipment to even have been developed previously.
- The specialized metallurgy & treatments needed to make "hard" armor. Iron/steel plate for other purposes (boilers, etc.) was optimized for physical properties which bore very little resemblance to "resistant to penetration by high velocity cannon balls".
As an aside, check out the 30 minute documentary "Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU) about the end of the linotype era. I'm amazed at the engineering that went into linotype printing.
My quick take - think of mid-nineteenth-century foundries and machine shops. Generally very small-scale, ~zero automation, no mass production. Almost every non-trivial thing (say, a little steam engine) that they made would involve a lot of castings, followed by a whole lot of steps where skilled machinists would cut, turn (on a lathe), drill, polish, rivet, etc. the castings, to make the finished product.
In that context, making metal plates for (steam) boilers would be one of the dullest and most repetitive work sorts of work that they'd do.
I've been assuming it has to do with a boiler room operation. You know. The sort of dodgy business posing as a whole team with an office based out of a prestigious locale, but its actually just one guy renting out the basement boiler room so he can use that address without technically lying. He sends the same form letter (possibly a scam) to thousands of potential "clients" per day, changing only the name but keeping it worded as if the addressee was the special object of consideration.
An element of writing and publishing that's become increasingly interesting to me are writers who also ran presses themselves. Mark Twain comes to mind --- he'd been an assistant in his own brother's print shop, and (checking Wikipedia just now as I write this), one of his earliest photgraphs shows Twain holding a composing stick of hot-metal type.
Twain seems to me to know the physicality of words and language, as well as the full process from idea to composition to typesetting to printing to distribution. His professional life spanned the period over which telegraphy emerged as a dominant factor in long-distance communication, where printing increased in speed from perhaps 100 impressions an hour to a million or more, and where the typewriter replaced handwritten manuscripts and correspondence.
He also struggled with the economics of writing and publishing, contemplating suicide in San Francisco with a nickle and a revolver to his name, being bailed out by his father-in-law and a Standard Oil executive, and going through bankruptcy. This all by a man now considered among the very best authors the United States has produced. The market can very much be an ass.
> Now that Twitter is on a downward spiral I’m rewriting my favorite tweetstorms in a more permanent medium,
This is much welcomed! Too many interesting things I missed because they were presented in a fragmented series of thoughts on twitter. I would just never open those links because the experience was jarring. If twitter chaos means people joining the article writers crowd, what a gain!
Hilarious the computer programmers in here who know the actual etymology of the term like they were around 100 years ago when the term spread from printing presses to the legal field
It's the nameplate, not the actual boiler plate itself that gets affixed to every boiler. It was eventually required by law, but most manufacturers were already doing it.
This is where the term comes from in printing (the boilerplate was the required details for every page that didn't get changed).
Then the same was used in code (we used the printing concept of 'boilerplate'), the required element for code in order to get started with a project.
I was worried that this would be an article about how boilerplate is never just boilerplate, how it's actually quite important and we shouldn't consider it so lowly. And that's fine. That's a good, valid opinion.
Fortunately, we are instead blessed with an etymology post, which is far more delightful to read, in my opinion.
Well, etymology is fun, but look, the post describes an early mechanism for inclusion of laid-out third-party content into a page! It's like having #include or <iframe> on a newspaper page from 1900.
Let's just put this in real-world terms we all can understand here.
If I sign up to an MMORPG and I'm outfitting my Paladin, should I choose the "boiler plate mail"? Does a space matter?
Interesting post. But much more important question: Why is boilerplate code still a thing? Either create a library or a code generator. The difference of a code generator is, that you don’t edit the generated code, just the parameters of the generator. Boilerplate code or scaffolding is just a nice word for „copy and paste with slight modifications“
Funny. Our professor told us it was called that because a boiler plate is something you cook on, like a griddle or hot plate. You can't cook your food until that basic element is in place.
It really is not. If anything, the experience has improved in the last couple of days.
There seems to be a surprisingly big subset of the population that hates Elon Musk and thinks he can do no good. It as if they want Twitter to fail just so they can be vindicated.
https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-plant-ow...