Convergent evolution is when two different and separate organisms evolve the same mechanism to solve a similar problem. Like wings in insects and birds, or fins in Whales and fish.

Recently I was explaining to my friend, a JavaScript developer, about a helper function I wrote in Rails that would auto-generate rows on a table given the correct data. Their response was,

"Congratulations, you have built your first react component"

Now, I have used react before, but it did not occur to me at all that by building this helper in Rails was akin to building a component in react. So my response was,

" Did I build a react component, or is it convergent evolution? "

Regardless, it made me wonder, what other pieces of code or way of doing things have we as developers all converged upon, regardless of language or framework?