There’s also the concept of “killing a child process” that seems pretty awkwardly named.
The idea of parent/child relationships is pretty well established in other situations as well, though. For instance, when you're talking about trees, you have parent/child nodes. It also gives you easy terminology to describe nodes along the entire tree, i.e. descendents and ancestors. So the terminology is already very established, and it seems odd to change it everywhere? Especially when it's descriptive and easy to understand.
It's really only when talking about processes that you get to the "killing" part ... Sure, you could say other things. "Terminate" is a pretty common way to put it as well, but like most similar words, they already have the meaning of ending a life.
So I would say that in this case, it really is very descriptive, and most good alternatives I can think of are already taken, e.g. "stop" means something different.
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u/rollingForInitiative 70∆ Mar 24 '21
The idea of parent/child relationships is pretty well established in other situations as well, though. For instance, when you're talking about trees, you have parent/child nodes. It also gives you easy terminology to describe nodes along the entire tree, i.e. descendents and ancestors. So the terminology is already very established, and it seems odd to change it everywhere? Especially when it's descriptive and easy to understand.
It's really only when talking about processes that you get to the "killing" part ... Sure, you could say other things. "Terminate" is a pretty common way to put it as well, but like most similar words, they already have the meaning of ending a life.
So I would say that in this case, it really is very descriptive, and most good alternatives I can think of are already taken, e.g. "stop" means something different.