From Sanskrit as an Object Oriented Language:
Lakshmi Thathachar’s view of Sanskrit’s nature may be paraphrased as follows: All modern languages have etymological roots in classical languages. And some say all Indo-European languages are rooted in Sanskrit, but let us not get lost in that debate. Words in Sanskrit are instances of pre-defined classes, a concept that drives object oriented programming [OOP] today. For example, in English ‘cow’ is a just a sound assigned to mean a particular animal. But if you drill down the word ‘gau’ –Sanskrit for ‘cow’– you will arrive at a broad class ‘gam’ which means ‘to move. From these derive ‘gamanam’, ‘gatih’ etc which are variations of ‘movement’. All words have this OOP approach, except that defined classes in Sanskrit are so exhaustive that they cover the material and abstract –indeed cosmic– experiences known to man. So in Sanskrit the connection is more than etymological.
It was Panini who formalised Sanskrit’s grammar and usage about 2500 years ago. No new ‘classes’ have needed to be added to it since then. “Panini should be thought of as the forerunner of the modern formal language theory used to specify computer languages,” say J J O’Connor and E F Robertson.
BTW, that clown Chomsky stole his structural linguistics from Panini, and never gave him credit. Anyway, it’s an interesting article so RTWT.