Keep the roots (to the 80th anniversary of Nicklaus Wirth)

But to stand,
I have to keep to the roots.
Boris Grebenshchikov

The anniversary of Niklaus Wirth is a very significant date for me. For three decades now, I have considered myself to be his student, starting in 1982, when I first picked up a copy of his preprint on the Modula-2 language made in Xerox. Around the same time, work began on our "Kronos".

I got acquainted with Professor Wirth later, in 1990, when he came to us in the Novosibirsk Academgorodok. In 1991, at the invitation of Wirth, he spent two weeks at his ETH Zurich and fell ill with Oberon. Then he went his own way, but this path would have been impossible without what Professor Wirth brought into my life.
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I am a happy man. I was incredibly lucky at the very beginning: I happened to be at the junction of three brilliant programming schools.

The first is the school of Academician Andrei Petrovich Ershov (1931-1988), which was comprehended mainly by his closest associate, Igor Vasilyevich Pottosin (1933-2001). The second is the school of Niklaus Wirth. First in Novosibirsk, then in Zurich. There was a third one that I saw in myself quite recently. This school NF ITMiVT (Novosibirsk branch of the Institute of Fine Mechanics and Computing).

Each of the three schools has given me its strength. Not talking about technology. Technology comes and goes. I'm talking about the “spirit” of the school, and about the part that was important to me. I do not try and do not feel entitled to critically evaluate any of these great schools. Perhaps someone else took something completely different from the same schools. I am writing about myself, trying right now to reveal the essence understood by me.

School Ershov . Perhaps the most important thing this school has given is a sense of belonging to the primary sources, a feeling of belonging to the Pioneers. The Soviet programming school went its own way and to trouble with EC computers / IBM was completely independent: in something weaker, in something stronger than European and American schools. The feeling of belonging to the primary sources gave strength and confidence: since our teachers made an optimizing Alpha translator on the iron on which they did it, we can at least repeat their achievement, and then go even further.

School Wirth gave us new horizons. Reading the preprints of Wirth, we opened the world and opened up to the world. More importantly, we learned from Wirth the simplicity and art of dealing with complexity. A simple example. The first compilers from Modula-2 language were two-pass, the language required. Similarly, our first cross-compiler, made by Dmitry Kuznetsov (Leo) on Burroughs 6700 under the leadership of I.V. Pottosin, was a two-pass. Then there was the story of “Kronos”. When we got the first Kronos, we urgently made a compiler with a trimmed Modula-2, so that we could develop at Kronos itself. We called this language and the Modula-0 compiler. The compiler was one-pass, for which it was necessary to make a change in the language. And then it was time to make the complete modula-2 compiler, and in accordance with the description of the language, we began to make it two-pass. But then the news came that Wirth corrected the language (he added forward-description of the procedures), and now one-pass compiler can be done. As a result, we have simplified our life and accelerated development. The main thing was that the programming language, which until then had been a “sacred cow” brought from somewhere above, became just a working tool that can be sharpened and corrected. We got a lesson: the resolution of creativity and an understanding of the importance and usefulness of simplifications.

School NF ITMiVT . In the NF ITMiVT I did my university degree. His theme was the Edison compiler for the Elbrus computer (thanks to Alexander Gutman, who gave this opportunity). The thesis combined two schools: the European programming school (Edison language, developed by Per Brinch Hansen) and the Soviet school, which gave us the Elbrus and missile defense of our country. During the work on the diploma of reference books, I had Avtokode Elbrus, the copy machine of Per Brinch Hansen’s “On Pascal Compilers”, David Gris’s book “Designing Compilers for Digital Computers”. And a little brochure - a description of the language Edison.

I have not seen this third school before. And she was very important to me. From the point of view of programming technology, it was, in many respects, the strict academic school of A.P. Ershov. But the spirit there reigned different: real applied work for solving real engineering problems. Personally, I feel closer to a real tangible business, I want to see not just ideas and articles, but an engineering embodiment. It is very important to me that my compiler from Modula-2 is still used to create onboard software of domestic satellites. I look at the sky and I understand that what is in it is a part of my work. This feeling of belonging to something big and real. And what could be more real than the protection of their homeland?

Each school gave its own, and together - even more, because the schools did not contradict, but complemented each other. I did not, and could not become a "fan" of any school. From these roots, I gradually went to understanding my own way - a fundamentally different programming.

Reading the news about what is happening in the Old World today, I think with bitterness: the latest fundamental achievements of computer Europe were what Edsger Dijkstra, Tony Hoar and Niklaus Wirth gave us.

But let's not talk about sad things. We live in Russia. And let “that Russia is gone,” but there is one that we have, and one that we can build.

Alexey Nedorya

Recommended materials
1. Kronos (history of one project): http://www.kronos.ru/
2. Project Oberon2005 (Virt's Great Tour to Russia): http://oberon2005.oberoncore.ru
3. Virtual computer museum of Eduard Proydakov.
“ Niklaus Wirth in Academgorodok ”

A photo:
1. Aleksey Nedorya, Niklaus Virt, I.V. Pottosin (foreground, from left to right), Novosibirsk, 1996


2. Alexey Nedorya, Niklaus Wirth and Vladimir Filippov (from left to right) at the Kronos 2.6 workstation. Moscow, Polytechnic Museum, 2005


3. Niklaus Wirth and Aleksey Nedorya, Yaroslavl, the lookout of the belfry, 2005


about the author
Alexey Nedorya - Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (1994).
Born on January 11, 1962 (Chita). In 1979 he entered the Novosibirsk State University (NSU). In 1982, he became one of the founders of the Intruders Club - an informal computer group of students of the physical and mechanical-mathematical faculties of the NSU. In 1984 he graduated from the NSU (thesis - compiler from the Edison language Per Brinch Hansen for the Elbrus-1 multiprocessor computer complex). In the spring of 1984, he participated in the creation of the legendary group "Kronos" (the first Soviet 32-bit processor), was the main developer of the Excelsior OS and several compilers from Modula-2. From 1985 to 1988 He worked in the "Start" VNTK (USSR response to the Japanese ambitious project of computers of the fifth generation). Further, until 1998, at the Institute of Informatics Systems named. A.P. Ershov, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1990, he personally met Niklaus Wirth; in 1991, was on probation with professor Wirth at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich). In 1991-1994 worked on the XDS multi-purpose instrumental system (Modula-2 and Oberon-2) and program code generation systems for onboard space complexes. Since 1994 - global IT outsourcing and offshore programming. Since 2001 - the development of new programming tools.