Yeah, what's up with this name? It puts me off immediately knowing of Moloch. Was everyone at Yahoo okay with this name as they worked on it? It seems so strange of a choice.
It's not a joke, it's just a name, so humor has nothing to do with it. The problem is that it's a weird choice of name. If someone named it "Hitler" or "Damnation" or "PoopEmoji" it would also be a bad name, but those would also not be jokes, just bad names.
In the Old Testament, Moloch was another tribe's god, and so was a competitor to Yahweh (the Jewish/Christian/Muslim god). The OT doesn't actually say there aren't other gods, but rather that you should only worship Yahweh. The OT describes Yahweh as one god among many others, although he does get credit for creation to make him seem stronger than those other gods. That eventually morphed into the notion that there were no other gods at all, many centuries later, and those competing gods got grandfathered in to being thought of as demons and devils within the framework of monotheistic Christianity (not sure about their role in Judaism). In a similar way, pagan gods got grandfathered in to being Christian saints in many cases, and pagan holidays turned into Christian holidays.
So: Moloch is a demon, according to Christianity. And I'm guessing the software involves a daemon process? So...yeah. Real clever. That's some really sophisticated humor there. Waka waka waka!
The hacker group on Secret, Strange, and True (TechTV series) was named Moloch. First time I heard of it. I don't know how much of that show was real or for show, though.
Yep. That reminds me, there's a major piece of OpenMPI called "schizo" that supports "multiple personalities" of runtime environment. I don't know how they got away with that one...