Ada was commissioned by the United States Department of Defense to replace the hundreds of incompatible languages then used in military and embedded systems. A design competition in the late 1970s led to the language, with the winning team led by Jean Ichbiah, and the result was named in honor of Ada Lovelace, regarded as the first programmer.
The language was formalized as ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A, approved on 17 February 1983. The standard number 1815 itself refers to Lovelace’s birth year. The “Reference Manual for the Ada Programming Language” is the authoritative primary definition of the original language.
Ada was built for large, long-lived, safety-critical software. It emphasizes strong static typing, packages for modular structure, exception handling, and built-in support for concurrency through tasks. These features reflect lessons from structured programming and earlier languages such as Pascal and Simula, aimed at catching errors at compile time rather than in the field.
Adopted widely in aviation, defense, and rail systems, Ada gained a reputation for reliability in domains where failure is unacceptable. The language was later revised through international standards, but the 1983 manual remains its founding document.