Many people use computers as a faster, better, more flexible way of doing the same jobs that their predecessors did with typewriters and slide rules. And, yes, we recognise that the computer as a whole is a different beast from these older, more specialised technologies... but we most certainly do group computer word processors with typewriters. We do group computerised calculators with slide rules.

Many people use Perl as a faster, better, more flexible way of doing the same jobs that their predecessors did with shell scripts. Many people even call Perl one-liners from shell scripts, as a more robust and portable alternative to awk or sed. I've done it myself, where (for example) I needed to cope with null bytes, but I didn't have a mandate to rewrite the entire complicated script in Perl. Well, if that kind of thing is what the job involves, then how else would you expect them to describe it?