Patrick Collison, an untrained 16–year–old schoolboy from Limerick, has developed a powerful new programming language for Web and general applications using a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X. His achievement led to him being crowned Irish Young Scientist of the Year in 2005 and helped him beat off over a hundred entrants to take second place in the European Union Young Scientist of the Year Awards, which took place in Moscow late last year. He is now being courted by IT companies and academics from around the world.

Patrick had been programming in Linux on desktop computers until he decided he needed a laptop computer to complete his first entry in the Irish Young Scientist of the Year Awards. “A lot of what I was doing required UNIX so I bought a 17–inch PowerBook G4”, he explains. His project was Croma, a powerful new high–level programming language for creating Web applications, and its success has made Patrick a Mac convert.

Web programming frustration

Patrick’s motivation for creating Croma was not to win an award. It came from his work on a number of local business Web sites in his home town of Limerick. Frustration at the problems he encountered with many Web programming languages drove him to create something to do the job more efficiently and effectively.

“I was spending a lot of time writing similar code for different projects”, he explains. “I thought this was an opportunity to make something better.”

Macs are very much in the dominant position when it comes to development work and it’s not hard to see why. From every point of view, they are the best platform available. The smart developers are using Macs.

— Patrick Collison

Although he had no formal training in programming at school, Patrick has been creating applications with the help of text books since the age of ten. “In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in programming languages as a study in itself”, says Patrick. “That’s mainly due to processors getting faster, which means you can use more complex programming techniques”.

Best development environment

Taking List Processor (LISP) as his first inspiration, Patrick incorporated ideas and elements from other languages to create Croma. Running Mac OS X v10.3 Panther at the time, his PowerBook was crucial for the development of the new language, not least because of the development tools it enabled him to access at no further expense.

“When it comes to programming, UNIX is the best option”, says Patrick. “So the fact that the Mac is UNIX-based is an advantage. The Mac also comes with Xcode, which is easily one of the best integrated development environments available for any software writing task”.

With Xcode shipped free as standard with his computer, Patrick used Carbon Emacs as his text editor, together with the SBCL compiler. Both of these highly functional development tools are freely available for download from the Mac development community or from www.sbcl.org.