This article is dedicated to the topic of discovering effective ways of developing students' programming abilities with the means of non-programming disciplines and activities. The authors argue that the process of educating students in programming becomes effective if students participates not only in programming lessons themselves, but also dedicates a significant amount of time to other academic disciplines and extracurricular activities. For example, these other activities are solving number-theoretics and chess endgame problems. The authors find that these disciplines and activities provide efficient means for developing programming capacities and therefore, their methods are the essential prerequisites for programming course. The significance of the obtained results is that they provide an effective alternative approach to the teaching process in educational institutions where the traditional methodology does not bring the desired pedagogical effect.