Ershov and "Programming — The Second Literacy"

The course you are taking is called the "Ershov Computer" for a reason. Andrey Petrovich Ershov (1931–1988) was one of the founding fathers of Soviet computer programming and the man who, in the mid-1970s, formulated the idea that shaped school informatics worldwide: programming is the second literacy. This article is a short history of who he was — and why the course's learning computer bears his name.

Akademgorodok: programming as a science

Ershov worked in Novosibirsk's Akademgorodok — a scientific center in the Siberian woods where young Soviet science gathered in the 1950s–60s. In 1966 his team created the Alpha system, one of the world's first automatic programming complexes with an optimizing compiler. In an era when programs were written in machine code, Alpha made a point: translating from a human language into a machine language can be reliable — even beautiful.

Around the same time Ershov wrote "Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming" (1972) — a text read today as a manifesto: programs are written by people for people, and code quality is a matter of culture as much as technique. Decades before the readability debates, he formulated the profession's core principles.

"Programming — the second literacy"

Ershov's main idea grew from a simple observation: computers were entering every sphere of life, and a person unable to state tasks for a machine was becoming illiterate — just like a person unable to read. He presented a report under that title in the mid-1970s, and in 1981 he brought it to the international community at the IFIP world conference on computers in education in Lausanne.

Importantly, "literacy" for Ershov never reduced to typing code. The second literacy is the ability to formulate algorithms precisely: to break a problem into steps, describe data, and find errors in one's own reasoning. A skill needed by programmers and engineers — and historians alike.

School informatics: a course ahead of its time

Ershov did not stop at ideas — he carried them to the school desk. Under his leadership the first Soviet school course, "Fundamentals of Informatics and Computing", and its textbook were created; the country began teaching informatics with them in 1985. Algorithms, executors, flowcharts — the whole language of school informatics grew out of his group and his texts.

Today the Institute of Informatics Systems in Novosibirsk bears his name, and his phrase "a programmer must combine a first-grader's inventiveness with an academician's rigor" lives on as a professional motto.

Why the "Ershov Computer"

The Ershov Computer course continues the second-literacy logic, but with the link that was missing in 1985: the layer beneath the programs. Before writing programs, you assemble with your own hands the machine they run on: gates, adders, flip-flops, memory — and only then assembly language and a processor. The learning 8-bit Harvard-architecture computer of the final levels is a small monument to the idea that understanding a machine begins with the circuit.

Thus the circle closes: Ershov wanted every person to be able to talk to a computer. This course teaches you to understand what happens when the computer talks back — from a single wire to a running program.