One of the main point listed while comparing Kakoune to Vim is the inversion of the verb-object paradigm to object-verb. As you know, this offers a lot of benefits in an interactive context.
Meanwhile, for many users speaking a Western European language, the order of operation may feel a bit “backward”.
After diving into this topic in this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–object–verb, it turns out that SOV constructs are in fact more frequent around the globe with 45% of languages using it over 42% for SVO.
So maybe Vi was biased in its model because it was written by Bill Joy, an American developer and the editing paradigm could have been different if Bill Joy was Korean. Interestingly, Vim has a strong following in Japan which is a SOV language and Japanese would feel at home with Kakoune.
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It’s funny @mawww was not biased as a French.
Interesting, I was somehow thinking SVO was more frequent.
Btw Japanese isn’t really a SOV language, as a particle-based language, any order is correct as long as the verb is at the end.
Another interesting take on the verb-noun vs noun-verb applied to Rogue-like games: http://simblob.blogspot.com/2019/10/verb-noun-vs-noun-verb.html
(Kakoune was even cited by someone in the comments section of this article)
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Thank you for the follow up, interesting article!
Also responding to myself
Btw Japanese isn’t really a SOV language, as a particle-based language, any order is correct as long as the verb is at the end.
This is technically “true”, but I learned later that in fact the order doesn’t have to always be applied for the language to be classified SOV, and in the case of Japanese the critical aspect is that you can omit particles as long as you follow the SOV order, hence SOV classification