I understand that etymologically, it makes perfect sense to pronounce daemon the same as demon because it’s the same word. But I’ll never stop pronouncing it day- instead of dee-, as if it’s a Ferengi captain.

systemctl restart artistd

Demon != Daemon

It took me way too long to learn this, please don’t confuse me.

If a daemon is an agent of ruin then … Systemd must be … Oh no !

Any background process, routine, or program contributes to the complexity of the overall system, which does indeed contribute to ruin as entropy gradually builds and collapse/death/crashing becomes inevitable.

Which is to say, I agree with these definitions.

Takes a comment instead.

“These damn demons!”

Demon: points

“Oh, its a memory leak.”

The origin for computing is actually documented too.

The term daemon was coined by programmers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project MAC (Mathematics and Computation) in 1963, inspired by Maxwell’s demon, an imaginary agent in physics and thermodynamics. In a thought experiment devised by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, a demon would control a small massless door between two chambers of gas, forcing fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction and slow-moving molecules to pass in the other direction. In Greek mythology, a daemon was considered a supernatural being or power.

https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/daemon

There’s also a response on Virginia Tech’s website from a professor from the group that used the word first.

Your explanation of the origin of the word daemon is correct in that my group began using the term around that time frame. However the acronym explanation is a new one on me. Our use of the word daemon was inspired by the Maxwell’s daemon of physics and thermodynamics. (My background is Physics.) Maxwell’s daemon was an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules of different speeds and worked tirelessly in the background. We fancifully began to use the word daemon to describe background processes which worked tirelessly to perform system chores. I found a very good explanation of all this online at:

I also found this stackexchange post that adds even more context to it.

and if I don’t?

This is the first one of these that I’ve even remotely comprehended.

Bump

Why should I?

Please write a 250-or-more word essay explaining 3 reasons why I should.

smash

Many years ago now I was told that we needed a way to turn a series of lights on and off for a custom bit of hardware. The hardware ran a Unix-like system so I decided that a daemon would be a good fit for the use case. I do not know what has become of my daemon of light but I do know whomever uses it must call the “summon” function to daemonize the process

You don’t tell me what to do!