Jean Ichbiah

Who was Jean Ichbiah?

Jean David Ichbiah was a French computer scientist and the initial chief designer of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers. At the time, he was a member of the Programming Research division at CII Honeywell Bull in Louveciennes, France. He had previously designed an experimental system implementation language called LIS, based on Pascal and Simula, and was one of the founding members of IFIP WG 2.4 on Systems Implementation Languages.

Ichbiah's team submitted the language design called "Green" to the competition to choose the United States Department of Defense's embedded programming language. When Green was selected in 1978, he continued as chief designer of the language, renamed "Ada". In 1980, Ichbiah left CII-HB and founded the Alsys corporation in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, which continued language definition to standardize Ada 83, and later went into the Ada compiler business, also supplying special validated compiler systems to NASA, the US Army, and others. He later moved to the Waltham, Massachusetts subsidiary of Alsys.