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I wouldn't go so far as to say "friendly", but sed is considered an absolute system essential by most (all?) Linux distributions and, therefore, is found under /bin instead of /usr/bin. Just like 'ls'.

It's hard NOT to like virtually guaranteed access to the power of regular expressions at any command line.

It is required for POSIX compliance.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

+1. Changing the spacing in a file using sed is cool! Never knew this.

And a bunch of other things. See my article series on "Sed One-Liners Explained":

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/sed-one-liners-explained-part-o...

Sed is actually Turing complete. You'd never want to do it, but you can.

It's in the same class of things as the BASIC interpreter written as troff macros, really.

$('body').css('word-spacing', 10);

God I love firebug and jQuery.

Why is cursory usage of sed and awk hacker news?

because I'm so young

Get Unix Power Tools and you will grow up in 2 weeks.

Shameless pickup from my tweet a week ago:

My haskell programs often end up just like the pipelines I made up with sed and awk 20 yrs ago.

Personally I use Perl for these tasks, outside of scripting in disk constrained environments, I have no use for either tool.

Sed & Awk - Still friendly after all these years