[jasode]

>I really, really wish they had dropped the 1-based indexing

>, my opinion on this topic is distorted because I spent a lot of time programming in C++

Mathematics-related programming[1] in MATLAB, R Language, Mathematica, SAS, etc all use 1-based indexing. Given that the originators of Julia are MATLAB users, it makes sense that they made a deliberate choice to keep 1-based indexing.

In other words, it was more important to grab mindshare from those previous math tools rather than appeal to C/C++/Java/etc programmers.

One outlier in the landscape of numerical programming is Python+NumPy/SciPy in the sense that it uses 0-based indices. While Julia also wants to be attractive to Python programmers, it still seems like the bigger motivation was programmers of MATLAB and other math software.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02U9AJMEWx0&feature=youtu.be...

[Fomite]

This, pretty much. Not to mention that, beyond languages, data is often 1-based indexed. I have never gotten a patient data set with ID=0 as the first entry. In my mind, compatibility with what users are expecting, and trying not to induce indexing errors, trumps most other concerns.

[jasode]

>, beyond languages, data is often 1-based indexed.

That's a good point. Probably the most widespread data example for non-programmers is spreadsheets (MS Excel, Google Sheets). The first row[1] in the spreadsheet is labeled as "1" instead of "0". The idiomatic Visual Basic programming code to loop through the rows would look something like:

  For Each cell In Range("a1:a25")  ' not "a0:a24"
      ' do work
  Next cell

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+excel+spreadsheet+...

[cohomologo]

Mathematica is actually 0-based - but with the zero index spot reserved. A list {1, 2, 3}=List[1, 2, 3] could be read as (List 1 2 3) in Lisp style; one can check if you have Mathematica that {1, 2, 3}[[0]] = List.

But I think that's neither here nor there. Whenever the index has more use than as a label, mathematics starts at zero. Modular arithmetic, polynomials, discrete fourier transformations - for that matter, any discrete approximation of continuous math - all naturally start at zero, and generate lots of -1s in one-based indexing.

[jasode]

In this subthread, the phrase "0-based / 1-based" is for the word "base" accessing the first element which is semantically equivalent to x[0] in C/C++/Python/etc or x[1] in R Language. Yes in Mathematica, putting "0" between "[" "]" will get you the reserved "head" but that's not how people are talking about "0-based" here.