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Someone once gave the sage advice of never using the word 'kill' in your code base. 'm_Object.KillListeners();' can sound pretty bad in court. A lawyer can try to make your source code a legal matter, and a jury is free to interpret 'm_Object.KillChildren();' as being proof of willful negligence. Of course, this doesn't really matter when you're actually exposing willful negligence over your internal communication channels.


> man kill

    KILL(1)     User Commands                    KILL(1)

    NAME
       kill - send a signal to a process

    SYNOPSIS
       kill [options] <pid> [...]
Probably not a unix user then?


That's exactly his/her point.

To a techie it's obvious what it means, but if the code runs on some hardware that ends up killing people for real and the code gets inspected during discovery, having words like that could be a liability since jurors are less likely to understand the technical meaning.

I worked in the automotive industry for a few years, we where told not to use the terms "crash","kill","die" and a few others anywhere in code or documentation for exactly this reason.


Opposing counsel doesn't care and nobody on the jury will be a Unix user. So ...




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