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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a·

Not sure if this is intentional or not but at first I thought this was something to do with Flex (the Lexer generator - as in one half of Flex and Bison). Something that is even more confusing since the first graphic in the page contains a BNF document and talks about compiler generation.

If Flex was a business with a trademark this would count as infringement without a doubt. Same type of product, same name.

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There is a trademark on the Flex name, which I believe originally belonged to Adobe but was later transferred to the Apache Foundation:

https://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2012/08/flex-trademark-assigned...

The name "flex" itself was based on the name of the original Unix lexer-generator "lex", just like its sibling parser generator "bison" was a play on words of lex's parser generator sibling "yacc" (which stands for "yet another compiler compiler"). Fun fact: one of the original authors of lex was Eric Schmidt, now executive chairman of Alphabet.

Flex is such a common name. Search for "flex" on the internet, and you'll find dozens of companies and products with the same name.

flexlm also is one of the most common license management tools.

Yeah, but how many of them are involved in compiler development? I think this is in poor taste. I can't imagine that they're not trying to capitalize on flex's fame.

The name is a reference to Alan Kay's M.Sc thesis from 1968: https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay68.html

Alan Kay's Flex quickly became Smalltalk while Flex (the lexer) spent the last 30 years doing its thing under that name. It might not be deliberate but it's definitely confusing and they definitely should have realized it would clash within the compiler development namespace. It's like making an HTML parser and calling it Chrome.

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