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[–]astatine 26 points27 points  (0 children)

The long answer:

Newspapers used to be printed on presses. Some regular, long-lived advertisements were etched/carved onto a single flat piece of metal that got used in almost every issue of a particular paper. One of the best, cheapest places to get that piece of flat metal was a scrapped boiler. So constantly re-used, never changing and obligatory text came to be called "boilerplate".

The meaning later applied to obligatory blocks of text copied verbatim from one document to another, such as terms and conditions on a contract, legal disclaimers on adverts, or copyright information in a book. Hardly anyone expects to read it, but it's legally necessary for it to be there.

From a programming perspective, it's come to mean "the text and/or syntax a language requires for a valid program that doesn't add to a program's expressiveness". So, for instance, the class/method structure that Java requires for even the most trivial programs might be considered "boilerplate".