Biography|Patrick Collison — The Newtown School That Sent Croma to Dublin

Castletroy College opened in 2000 on Newtown Road in Castletroy, on the eastern edge of Limerick.

Patrick Collison was a fourth-year student here in January 2005 when the Esat BT Young Scientist judges picked his project from 480 on the floor of the RDS.

The school is a co-educational community college. The public pin is the building itself, at Newtown, Castletroy, eircode V94 6D85.

The project he carried out of these classrooms was CROMA, a new dialect of Lisp written for the web.

The Irish Times recorded the claim the judges accepted: a login and user-management system that took more than 150 lines in Perl or PHP took about 20 lines in CROMA.

He had already been runner-up at the same national exhibition the year before, with an artificial-intelligence project he nicknamed Isaac.

Castletroy is not a historic campus. It is a large suburban school that happened to have one student who treated a programming language as a Leaving Cert side project.

The prize ceremony happened in Dublin. The work happened here.

His younger brother John was still at this school two years later, sitting fifth year, when the brothers sold Auctomatic.

Photo: David Hawgood, Castletroy Community College, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons