“样板代码”是任何看似重复的代码，它们一次又一次地出现，以获得一些看起来应该简单得多的结果。

这是一个主观的定义。

这个术语来源于报纸行业的“标准版”:wiki

样板文件是优秀程序员所避免的:重复。

从维基百科:

在计算机编程中，样板文件是用来描述必须包含在许多地方且很少或没有更改的代码段的术语。它更常用于被认为是冗长的语言，即程序员必须编写大量代码来完成最少的工作。

所以基本上，你可以把样板代码看作是一种编程语言所需要的文本，在你用这种语言编写的程序中经常用到。

现代语言正在尝试减少它，但旧的语言也有特定的类型检查器(例如OCaml有一个类型推断器，它允许您避免在像Java这样更冗长的语言中作为样板代码的太多声明)

Joshua Bloch有一个关于API设计的演讲，涵盖了糟糕的API如何使样板代码成为必要。(参考样板文件的第46分钟，今天听这个)

In practical terms, boilerplate code is the stuff you cut-n-paste all over the place. Often it'll be things like a module header, plus some standard/required declarations (every module must declare a logger, every module must declare variables for its name and revision, etc.) On my current project, we're writing message handlers and they all have the same structure (read a message, validate it, process it) and to eliminate dependencies among the handlers we didn't want to have them all inherit from a base class, so we came up with a boilerplate skeleton. It declared all the routine variables, the standard methods, exception handling framework — all a developer had to do was add the code specific to the message being handled. It would have been quick & easy to use, but then we found out we were getting our message definitions in a spreadsheet (which used a boilerplate format), so we wound up just writing a code generator to emit 90% of the code (including the unit tests).

样板文件是一种写作单元，可以不作任何更改地反复使用。通过扩展，这种思想有时应用于可重用编程，如“样板代码”