What is boilerplate code?

Question

A coworker had never heard of this, and I couldn't provide a real definition. For me, it's always been an instance of 'I-know-it-when-I-see-it'.

Bonus question, who originated the term?

Solution 1

"boilerplate code" is any seemingly repetitive code that shows up again and again in order to get some result that seems like it ought to be much simpler.

It's a subjective definition.

The term comes from "boilerplate" in the newspaper industry: wiki

Solution 2

Boilerplate code means a piece of code which can be used over and over again. On the other hand, anyone can say that it's a piece of reusable code.

The term actually came from the steel industries.

For a little bit of history, according to Wikipedia:

In the 1890s, boilerplate was actually cast or stamped in metal ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union. Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written.

Now according to Wikipedia:

In object-oriented programs, classes are often provided with methods for getting and setting instance variables. The definitions of these methods can frequently be regarded as boilerplate. Although the code will vary from one class to another, it is sufficiently stereotypical in structure that it would be better generated automatically than written by hand. For example, in the following Java class representing a pet, almost all the code is boilerplate except for the declarations of Pet, name and owner:

public class Pet {
    private PetName name;
    private Person owner;

    public Pet(PetName name, Person owner) {
        this.name = name;
        this.owner = owner;
    }

    public PetName getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(PetName name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public Person getOwner() {
        return owner;
    }

    public void setOwner(Person owner) {
        this.owner = owner;
    }
}

Solution 3

On the etymology the term boilerplate: from http://www.takeourword.com/Issue009.html...

Interestingly, the term arose from the newspaper business. Columns and other pieces that were syndicated were sent out to subscribing newspapers in the form of a mat (i.e. a matrix). Once received, boiling lead was poured into this mat to create the plate used to print the piece, hence the name boilerplate. As the article printed on a boilerplate could not be altered, the term came to be used by attorneys to refer to the portions of a contract which did not change through repeated uses in different applications, and finally to language in general which did not change in any document that was used repeatedly for different occasions.

What constitutes boilerplate in programming? As may others have pointed out, it is just a chunk of code that is copied over and over again with little or no changes made to it in the process.

Solution 4

It's code that can be used by many applications/contexts with little or no change.

Boilerplate is derived from the steel industry in the early 1900s.

Solution 5

From Wikipedia:

In computer programming, boilerplate is the term used to describe sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration. It is more often used when referring to languages that are considered verbose, i.e. the programmer must write a lot of code to do minimal jobs.

So basically you can consider boilerplate code as a text that is needed by a programming language very often all around the programs you write in that language.

Modern languages are trying to reduce it, but also the older language which has specific type-checkers (for example OCaml has a type-inferrer that allows you to avoid so many declarations that would be boilerplate code in a more verbose language like Java)

View more solutions