I remember a few years ago I stayed up all night, watching Meg White play the drums in live DVDs of The White Stripes. I was mesmerized. (YouTube doesn’t really do it justice.) I couldn’t get enough of it.

So I guess Meg White is a mesmerizing person. Is that a big deal? Probably not. Everything and nothing is mesmerizing nowadays.

Then why did I forget to go to sleep that night?

I think I know the answer to that. See, I think the very fact that Meg White mesmerized me was mesmerizing. I started reflecting, thinking about the situation and myself and it became this spiraling feedback loop where I was thinking about my thoughts and feelings as if from a third-person perspective.

My gut reaction had been sort of, “yeah, okay, a girl drummer — I get it... it’s a girl band,” — which of course it isn’t —, and then like, “no, oh, wait, okay... well, I get it anyway... I think?” I was thinking that the girl drummer thing was somehow ironic. But it didn’t really make sense and I felt a little uneasy.

Of course it turned out my gut feeling was dead wrong and in fact I didn’t get it at all. It became evident that there was no irony and no pretense and nobody was laughing or being cute.

All there was was just good old rock’n’roll.

Oh, and the drummer was a girl. Is that a big deal?

But wait. Slow down. That gut feeling I had is important. The gut feeling is what we call intuition. Intuition is important. The human brain is based on intuition.

So according to my intuition, Meg White shouldn’t have been sitting there and playing drums in this band, and yet there she was on the screen doing it, and that’s what kept me glued all night: the optical illusion of it. It was simultaneously real and unreal.

I learned a seemingly elementary fact that night: It is possible for the drummer in a rock band to be a humbly cute girl in a beautiful red dress.

This seems trivial but I think it’s actually pretty deep. I guess a similar experience is, for example, learning that it’s possible for your father to cry. Once you internalize the knowledge, it seems elementary, but before that, seeing it happen feels like watching an optical illusion.

I think this happens all the time as you go through life and meet real, breathing people who never quite live up or down to the expectations you didn’t even know you had about them.

Today, another one of these seemingly elementary facts dawned on me. It turns out that it is actually possible for girls to be expert programmers.

I know, I know: it seems counterintuitive — at least if you’re as prejudiced as I am — but I promise that once you internalize this knowledge it actually is kind of self-evident and not weird at all. It’s like, “is that a big deal?”

So I was watching Elisabeth Hendrickson give a presentation about agile testing earlier, and it was really good. Unremarkably, she is much smarter, more talented and more knowledgable about programming than I am. I’m sitting there in awe listening to her talk like it’s Bob Dylan singing in the sixties.

Then later, I just happened to find myself reading Jeni Tennison’s blog. I was intrigued and a little surprised to see that she was into Ruby and had just written a BDD framework for XSLT a few months ago.

Jeni Tennison is a person I’ve respected very sincerely for a long time, because she seems to be a true expert. One of those people who simply know everything there is to know about a subject, and don’t ever do anything stupid or wrong. Like Taylor Campbell. Everything that comes out of their mouths sounds like beautiful free verse poetry.

Anyway, her new framework was so well-designed — unsurprisingly — that it seemed it could not have been done any other way. (She probably wasn’t even trying.) And reading the documentation was pure joy.

Later, I reflected a bit about the gender of these two people, and the combination of these two simple events helped me realize that girls can really be as good programmers as anyone else.

I realized that Elisabeth Hendrickson and Jeni Tennison are quite simply better programmers than I am. They like the same stuff that I do, they value the same good things that I do, and they know what’s hip and cool. They’re on top of their game, they’re way ahead of me, and I want to be like them.

In a way, this whole discussion seems absolutely trivial and basic. I feel like a three-year-old when I say I’m just starting to learn these things.

Everybody knows that sex and gender matters about as much as race or, like, body weight. Not a big deal, right?

I mean, rationally, I already knew all this. That’s not the point.

The point is now I know it intuitively.

And that difference is a big deal.

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