I think "easy to use" might be an overstatement. I spent a fair bit of time trying to get in to the flex/bison workflow and it never seemed to click. I've found

I think "easy to use" might be an overstatement. I spent a fair bit of time trying to get in to the flex/bison workflow and it never seemed to click. I've found it much easier to use PEG parsers, parser combinators, or a hand-written recursive descent parser. Based on their ubiquity and the high reviews, I'm sure they're great tools once the initial hump is passed but that initial hump is quite large.