Comment by aplorbust

"Is there any non-artistic reason..."

I have seen some programmers quoted as saying they believe writing programs is "art". I think one of the interviews with Arthur Whitney has him saying writing programs is analogous to writing poetry.

Assuming one does not use backtracking as is done by Pement here, IME, the speed of sed routinely beats other, larger scripting languages for many tasks.

The basic functionality of many unix utilities can be replicated using sed, e.g. tee, etc.

When one considers the small size and simplicity of this program, and that it is probably as commonly found on unix operating systems as echo, ls or cd, knowing how to read and write sed can be very useful.