{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Incredible India Travel | Social Impact & Culture Tours","title":"Panini: The World's First Programmer Wrote Code in Sanskrit, Twenty Five Centuries Before Computers Existed","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1127,"description":"In 1959 a computer scientist named John Backus invented a notation for describing the grammar of programming languages.It is called Backus Naur Form, and it is one of the foundational tools of modern computer science. Every programming language you have ever used was at some point defined using a descendant of this notation.In 1967 a researcher reading an old Sanskrit grammar wrote a letter to the Communications of the ACM, the most respected computer science journal in the world, to point out something extraordinary.Someone had already invented Backus Naur Form. Twenty five hundred years earlier. In Sanskrit.Panini was a scholar who flourished between 400 and 200 BC, and in order to describe the rules of Sanskrit grammar he invented a notation equivalent in its power to that of Backus.The researchers proposed a new name for the notation computer scientists had been using for nine years.The Panini Backus Form.This episode tells the story of Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian born near the Indus river in what is now Pakistan, who wrote a grammar so rigorous, so mechanical and so completely rule based that twenty five centuries later, computer scientists building the first programming languages discovered he had already solved their problem.What You Will Discover in This EpisodeThe complete story of Panini, born in Shalatula near Attock on the Indus river sometime between the 4th and 7th century BC, and his likely connection to the ancient university of Taxila, which also produced Chanakya, the strategist behind the Mauryan Empire, and Charaka, the father of Ayurvedic medicineThe structure of the Ashtadhyayi, Panini's eight chapter grammar of Sanskrit containing approximately 4000 sutras, generative rules that completely define the language mechanically rather than through memorised examples, in a structure modern linguists compare directly to a formal computer programming languageHow Panini classified 1700 basic linguistic elements into systematic categories using...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/eWrZ3doNBWF40S0S56sC17IDwfhLRtHiDkqKOrNCvtA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85Yjg5/Y2Q3ODM2NzZkOTcz/NGJiMWMwMDEzMTFl/YjI3NC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}