Vikram Chandra's article was well written until the point where he fell to the seductive charms of 'Sanskrit is a programming language' line peddled by mostly, though not all, non-Sanskritists.
Where does he say that? What I could find was these two bits:
> modern programmers would immediately compare the workings of Pāṇini’s rules to those of string functions in modern programming languages
(this is not about Sanskrit as a language, but specifically about Pāṇini's rules which is analogous to a term-rewriting system / string functions / macros)
and
> to claim that Sanskrit would be a perfect language for computer programming.[46] This claim demonstrates an essential misunderstanding of what programming languages
