I don't think anyone is arguing that it's always a bad metaphor, just that it's an unnecessarily violent one.

Do you not see how ridiculous that is? Do you wince every time you kill a process? A program crashes? You slice a steak? chown a file?

I don't think it's ridiculous, no. (But I think wincing at some of your examples would be.)

Really I'm not the best person to judge though. I'm happy to be guided by people who experience racism and groups tackling the legacy of slavery. Because those things seem important whereas my terminology preferences for asymmetric nodes in a distributed system, when there are plenty of sensible alternatives, seem less so.

Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.

Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.

There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"

Actually, we do call it a "purge". That's not a word without connotations.

We also kill child processes. No-one's had a problem with that till now. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor.

These aren't metaphors, though. For example, a "parent process" uses the term "parent" that's defined as "a source or origin of a smaller or less important part," not "a father or mother," or one of the other half-dozen definitions

"Kill" is definitely a metaphor. A more literal phrase would be "force stop".

One of the definitions of "kill" is "to put an end to or cause the failure or defeat of (something)." This is not a metaphor either.

One of the definitions of "slave" is "A device (such as a secondary flash or hard drive) that is subject to the control of another". Is that not a metaphor either?

> There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"

Which is a worse analogy, because "following" is a choice and doesn't have to be strict, unlike slave (execute commands or get killed).

There is no need for the metaphor to be perfect. It should make clear what each device/process/whatever does without confusing people. The exact details aren't that important, understanding the roles is.

On my computer I can open a folder twice without closing it. I can't open a physical folder twice without closing.

With a race condition, no one cares if both processes started at the same time. That's not an important part of the analogy.

Even your point about killing doesn't really fit with the metaphor. Historically, whipping would be the most common punishment.

I do agree with your idea that the metaphor has to be clear. Modbus replace master/slave with client/server, which tends to confuse people used to the old analogy. It's not ideal, but neither is referring back to that time we could trade people.

We use terms like demon, basically a personification of evil.

The origin of the term is not so evil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology

But we don't seem to care about origins of words, Master itself didn't mean slave owner until late in the 17th century.

And we'll stop in the event of the demonic invasion of Earth, but Doom 2 remains just a video game.

Demon, also spelled daemon, Classical Greek daimon, in Greek religion, a supernatural power. In Homer the term is used almost interchangeably with theos for a god. The distinction there is that theos emphasizes the personality of the god, and demon his activity.

Apparently copyright infringement is also tantamount to raping and pillaging on the high seas (piracy).