[collinf]

My only fleeting experience with Julia is in a Numerical Analysis Course three years ago... but it has 1-indexed arrays so its good for scaring away all people who are programmers before analysts/scientists!

Really though, I think it has a better type system and a syntax that translates easier to mathematical expressions. Other than that, Python's breadth of packages will be hard to overcome.

[chriselrod]

I know it is not the default, but this package has no overhead over the default arrays according to recent benchmarks, and provides 0-indexed arrays: https://github.com/JuliaArrays/OffsetArrays.jl

I confess, not being the default is a big thing. I've definitely had times where I thought "this would be easier with 0 indexed arrays", but it can then be harder to commit to adding a dependency and making that change vs just adding awkward looking "+1"s to all the indexes. Coming from math/science, there's lots of times 1-indexing makes more sense / is more familiar. It's normal there to start counting from 1, so it can be easier to translate.

[phkahler]

It's non uncommon in mathematics to index from zero as well.

[cultus]

You get used to the 1-based indexing pretty quick. It's a non-issue. 1-based indexing is the standard in math, and also Matlab and Fortran. For the primary use-case of Julia, it makes sense. Julia REALLY tries to be easy for Matlab users, who still dwarf Python users in science.

[kgwgk]

> Julia REALLY tries to be easy for Matlab users

Not so much currently:

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-eye-has-been-deprecate...

[pjmlp]

When I started programming, all my languages with exception of Assembly used 1-indexing, so no, it doesn't scare all programmers.

[geoalchimista]

Even among scientists there are people who don't like 1-indexed arrays (me, one data point)! However, Julia 0.7 and 1.0 have the keyword "begin" so that you can basically program arrays in an index-agnostic way.