Jean Ichbiah, best known as the inventor of the Ada programming language, died Jan. 26, at age 66 of a brain tumor. According to one online eulogy, “Ichbiah’s main appearance under the limelight was his astounding success in convincing the U.S. Department of Defense to adopt his proposal, later to become Ada, as the winner of the DoD competition for the design of the programming language of the future.”
This might be the expected place for us to comment on the history of the Ada programming language, but it’s much more interesting to point you at this page of photographs of programming language authors. Do you notice how many of them (the male ones anyway) have facial hair?
—Esther Schindler
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