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by Datenstrom 2068 days ago
Yes it is possible to make those changes and even if it wasn't it does not detract from the impressive and useful innovations Julia has made. That is why I usually refer to them as cosmetic but that is possibly not the correct word either because it does not convey the implications of having that default beyond simply being unattractive. Cultural may be the correct term.

Julia claims that it wants to solve the two language problem. To do that it must win both the scientific compute, HPC, data science, machine learning, etc. group and the CS, software engineering, dev ops group. I've shown Julia to quite a few members of the latter and they always love the idea and technical capabilities of Julia but visibly cringe when they find out it uses one based indexing. They also almost universally find the syntax ugly.

Unfortunately the available packages to change that also does not help because most people will never change the defaults and IMHO it would be bad to do so. When writing Python you follow the PEP-8 style guide, it is just best practice to follow the languages conventions so everyone is on the same page. This is the same problem with C++ trying to add all these new features and a solid package manager like Rust has, it will never fly, people just won't use it everywhere, it isn't going to be in the standard library, It isn't the default and it isn't part of the culture.