[ffriend]

Fortran, Mathematica, Matlab, R, Lua - all start indexing from 1 (you can find an incomplete list in [1]). For users coming from these languages (which is a large part of the Julia community) the cognitive load would be in the opposite direction.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...

[dekhn]

I suspect the number of C++/Python or Python/Fortran (where users use 0-based indexing) programmers is larger than Fortran +Math +Matlab + R + Lua.

Anyway, I'm not defending my decision as a globally correct one- it only matter to me.