[ajarmst]

As Jef Raskin famously observed: "intuitive" just means "familiar". O- vs 1- based indexing is a source of curious passion for many people, as it really just reflects what you first learned and (consequently) what mental model you are using. Like most matters of taste, there is no objectively correct answer.

If you came up in assembly language and C, like me, you tend to think of array indices as offsets, and the first item obviously has an offset of 0. Anything else is absurd. If you came up in any number of environments that view collections like arrays from the standpoint of something like set theory, then the first (1st!) item clearly has an index of 1. What would a zeroeth item even mean?!. See---it's just point of view and familiarity.

I resisted Python for years because I just couldn't get past the clearly fragility and cognitive burden of something so mind-bogglingly stupid as meaningful whitespace. It took me a while to realize this was much more about me than about Python.

You bounce off of these contextual things all the time in Mathematics: Is 1 prime? Do the Whole numbers include 0? Etc., etc. The answer is---depends on who you ask and what you're working on. It can be implicit, especially to a community (like, say, users of a programming language), or it may need to be explicit to avoid confusion "In this house, we obey the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic! 1 is not prime!" As long as you get those particular ducks in a row, the problem is mostly just impedance from people mistaking their personal experience for natural law.