Is sed an insult to "human readbility" ?
bhousel: I actually still use sed once in a while.  I sometimes show up at a corporate client and need to cleanup files on a unix or cygwin machine that is completely locked down (no install of anything allowed ever) and doesn't have anything easier to use (perl/python).  At least you can always fall back to it and perform regexp replaces, fix unix/dos newlines, etc.