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Jean David Ichbiah, Ada Lead Designer, Dies at 66


By P. J. Connolly
March 1, 2007 — 
Pioneering computer scientist Jean David Ichbiah died on Jan. 26, reportedly of complications from a brain tumor and a recent fall. He was 66.

Ichbiah was considered the chief designer of the Ada programming language, which had its roots in his prior work on systems implementation languages.

In 1975, Ichbiah was a member of CII Honeywell Bull’s programming research division in Louveciennes, France, when the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) realized that, of its vast stable of embedded programming languages, none supported safe modular programming, and many were either hardware-dependent or obsolete. The DoD’s Higher Order Language Working Group spent the next few years creating a series of working papers that culminated in the “Steelman” requirements document of 1978.

Because no programming language of the day met the “Steelman” criteria by including now-common features such as exception handling, parallel computing and runtime error-checking, the DoD hired four teams to design a language that would meet

or exceed the specifications. Ichbiah’s team, code-named Green, submitted the proposal that was officially adopted in 1979 and given the name Ada, after Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

IBM fellow Grady Booch was a recent graduate of the Air Force Academy when he was assigned to what would become the government’s Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO), in the midst of what he called the “bakeoff” between Green and the other proposals.

Booch noted that Ichbiah’s contributions shaped the evolution of software development: “You can honestly say that the work in Ada, and the work that Jean did…were the catalysts to the work I did on object-oriented design.”

Ichbiah was a brilliant man, said Booch, “and had such a deep understanding about language design, and the ideas of strong typing and abstract data types that, back then, were relatively new concepts. But he was able to…put in his head all of these ideas and weave them together, to produce what was at the time quite a beautiful language. Jean was way ahead of his time.”

The first standard Ada version was adopted in 1983, and was kept under strict control by the DoD. But in 1987, Ada 83 was adopted as an ISO standard and released to the public. Within three years, more than 200 validated Ada compilers were in use.

Meanwhile, Ichbiah had left CII Honeywell Bull to found Alsys (now Aonix) in 1980, which continued the work of defining Ada and eventually entered the compiler business. He later moved to Massachusetts to take a more direct role in the management of the company’s U.S. subsidiary.

After leaving Alsys, Ichbiah started Textware in 1992, which specialized in text entry hardware and software for mobile devices. At Textware, he continued his practice of awarding fine wine as a contest prize: Ichbiah had presented a bottle of Beaujolais to the only person who found a semantic error in the draft specification of Ada, while in recent years, Textware’s winning entrants were presented with bottles of Dom Perignon.

Ichbiah was named a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1987, and was a knight of the country’s L?gion d’honneur. He was interred in Wakefield, Mass., near his home of Burlington.


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