"Whitney sent Oleg and Pierre some of the C code he was working on, and notes on a problem he didn’t know how to solve. They emailed back a solution, coded in his style."

Did Pierre and Oleg think their solution out in standard code first and then make it Whitney-like, or did they find themselves thinking in Whitneyese straight away? I imagine their teacher may have noticed Whitney tendencies and that is what led to the original encouragement to make contact.