4 ms·
~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma: http://lemonodor.com/archives/
by mschaef 9y ago
~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma:
http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html
I'm glad to see he has continued to do well.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoThat's really interesting. How did you know that?
- pkilgore 9y agoThe article: "Surely the smartest redhead in Ireland,” read one headline about 16-year-old Patrick being named Young Scientist of the Year for developing a programming language and artificial intelligence system."
- defen 9y agoAre "redheads in Ireland" stereotyped as being particularly smarter or stupider than other Irish? That's the only way I can make sense of that headline - it makes as much sense to me as "the smartest black-haired person in Ireland"
- s_dev 9y agoNo -- "smartest red head in Ireland" just an arbitrary qualifier and a throwaway comment -- if anything it just emphasizes the number of red heads in Ireland.
- barking 9y ago10% of Irish people are redheads while about a half carry the gene apparently. I'd be willing to bet the dark haired brother has forearms covered in freckles
- Symbiote 9y agoThere's discrimination against red-haired people in Ireland. https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/discrimination-against-redheads-very-real-says-author https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/discrimin...
- magic_beans 9y agoBecause redheads are so unbelievably common in Ireland, calling him the "smartest redhead in Ireland" is a clever little joke that draws a contrast between his exotic intelligence (building an AI system, desigining a programming language) and his incredible ordinariness (having red hair in Ireland).
- mschaef 9y agoI've plinked around with Lisp implementations for quite a while, and remember the press he got back in 2004 for Croma. This was before all of the startup stuff of the last 12 years, so at the time it was just a story of a really smart high school student doing something awesome with a style of programming language I really liked.
- agumonkey 9y agoVery interesting story
- akhilcacharya 9y agoI read these stories and feel like I was the only good kid that actually focused in class.
- komali2 9y agoI read them and see how all these smart entrepreneur types dicked around in class reading books, just like me, except they turned out to be geniuses, and I ended up just derping around Asia and frittering away my youth. What did I do wrong? I blame WoW :P
- Kluny 9y agoHaha, same here. I always used to feel so justified for all the time I spent reading scifi novels in class instead of paying attention, cause all these millionaires were doing it too... and here I am, a junior developer facing a layoff, 5 years into my career. Such success!
- Qub3d 9y agoSurvivorship Bias [0]. It happens to be that a certain type of rebellious/free thinking personality is the most likely to end up making a successful tech company; but that doesn't mean everyone who exhibits that trait succeeds. [0]:https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoMost of it is fluff anyway. You could conveniently remember your own history in a different way if it helped to gain an "entrepreneur" label. No one's going to bother calling them out on it even if it weren't true.
- Scramblejams 9y agoThanks for that. I'd like to know why he decided first class macros were a bad idea.
- mschaef 9y agoI obviously can't speak for him, but macros do complicate things, particularly when ahead-of-time compilation gets involved. There's also the issue that macros have some of the same sorts of issues as inline functions - because they're expanded in place, they can introduce hidden forms of coupling.
- jjwiseman 9y agolemonodor? Haven't heard that name in years. Super glad that Patrick has found so much success, and created what seems like an amazing organization.