[exDM69]

From the comments section of that G+ post I found this Dijkstra essay with really good arguments for zero-based indexing.

Not only does it have sound mathematical reasoning but also some anecdotal evidence of problems caused by one-based indexing in programming languages.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

[baldfat]

For statistics 1 based is much cleaner and less error prone in my opinion. R is 1 based and it drives me nuts to have to switch to Pandas.