Interesting though useless knowledge on the evolution of the term "boilerplate" in programming context.

TL;DR: first it refers to the plate used to roll into water boiler cylinder in the steam age. Then in linotype age there is a technique to make mold lead into the lines of text for printing. These plates of lines of texts looks similar to boilerplates. And the connotation of "copy-pasted" text comes from the usage of these plates been casted several times and sent to various new publishers for printing.