[lucozade]

> I don't see how scientists or staticians would be unable to understand a basic knowledge like zero-based indexing

Of course they can. In fact, they tend to have a complex relationship with indexing which is why Julia supports such a rich indexing language.

But the default the Julia team chose was the natural, mathematical default rather than the natural memory addressing default. Which, given what they were trying to achieve, was entirely sensible.

And, on a side note, just because something is physically possible, it doesn't follow that it's the most sensible choice. Otherwise language development would have stopped at the first Turing complete language.

What the Julia team is attempting to do is make the transition for their target audience as seamless as possible. This can be seen in their indexing language but also in their choice of dispatch, their type conversion architecture etc. A great deal of thought goes into these decisions (you can see it in their issue/RFC trackers). "A CS freshman could work it out" doesn't even come close.