It was proving difficult to find MONK programmers.

[This week Marcel listened to the just-rediscovered tapes of a 1957 session of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane, at Carnegie Hall.] Hugely exciting. Two geniuses at their peak. ... Absorbing and imaginative - they never met in real life.

now she has, although it's a difficult relationship.

It was a very difficult game on a very sloppy field. They have a couple of tough defenders, and we had a tough time trying to figure them out.

Programmers can be lazy.

... bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with
sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles,
their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised
to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems
to be riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so
transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts
over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic
text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours
at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them:
coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near
the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and
unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are
oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
These are computer bums, compulsive programmers ...