I actually kind of love the BML example, because it's something Brad came up with in 1996 for the site he made before he made LiveJournal because there was no templating language at the time and he correctly identified that as a missing tool and made it. Except he was years ahead of his time and the rest of the industry didn't figure out that it was going to be a necessary tool for years after, and by that time, BML was old enough and badly documented enough that it didn't catch on and people made other versions instead! So many of the technologies Brad invented for LJ (and for FreeVote before it) were that kind of "first draft of a thing that somebody else later came up with the second draft of and the second draft was the one that caught on" and it's just fascinating to see.