Saturday, February 6, 2021

Boilerplate and bookkeeping code

 Etymology

"Boiler plate" originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers to heat water. Metal printing plates 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.

Boilerplate code

In computer programming, boilerplate is the sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration. Such boilerplate code is particularly salient when the programmer must include a lot of code for minimal functionality.

A related phenomenon, bookkeeping code, is code that is not part of the business logic, but is interleaved with it in order to keep data structures updated or able to handle secondary aspects of the program.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_text

alt. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_code

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