The Net is a place. It is a world, with many areas to explore. One such area is PerlMonks. Another is the Yahoo portal. There is a protocol that underlies the Net, in the same fashion that the laws of physics form a protocol that underlies the "Real World". That doesn't make the Net, and what happens on it, any less real.

Do you realize that I am a male?

No, I don't know that you're male. It doesn't matter to me what gender you are. I have always taken your posts and evaluated each post solely in the light of your previous posts. Nothing more.

... the myth of the young male hacker.

Let's address this for a moment. Most programmers I know, who are in the business, don't have a male hacker myth, especially not those who work primarily in Perl. I have no idea what the people who create Perl think, but I know about the people I come across. I've worked with Perl written by men and Perl written by women. In every case, I've preferred the code written by someone intelligent and experienced, irregardless of gender. In some cases, the author was male, in some female. And, in talking to my colleagues (who are consultants, like me, in several areas of the USA), the same holds true.

The "male hacker" is a wonderful literary device. It does hold true, to some degree, solely due to the fact that men are encouraged over women to enter engineering fields. But, nowhere near the level that many people think it's true.

In addition, the "male hacker" is generally a piss-poor programmer. Most hacked code tends to be poorly formatted, with no comments, and is very difficult to extend. I personally don't ever want to work with hacked code, unless I know the hacker.