From 1977 to 1983, he was the chief designer of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers.

From 1972 to 1974, he worked on designing an experimental system implementation language called LIS, based on Pascal and Simula.

[4] He had been chairman of the Simula User's Group and was one of the founding members of IFIP WG 2.4 on Systems Implementation Languages.

[5] He then joined CII Honeywell Bull (CII-HB) in Louveciennes, France, becoming a member of the Programming Research division.

In the 1990s, Ichbiah designed the keyboard layout FITALY, which is specifically optimized for stylus or touch-based input.