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."
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_code#Origin