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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
by fumeux_fume 4y ago
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."
- a_t48 4y agoThe 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. Neat.
- petdance 4y agoThe 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."