[BeetleB]

As someone who's coded with both schemes, I really don't see it as being an issue - it's the equivalent of "I won't use Python because of whitespace."

[ChrisRackauckas]

I plan to train an NLP bot from Hacker News 1-based indexing discussions to automatically generate the mandatory thread on it so that nobody ever has to participate in it again. It's so unoriginal that it's a better fit for ML automation than a human brain.

[leephillips]

Also these comments just tell us about the background of the commenter, and nothing else. Anyone who has had to translate numerical or scientific algorithms into both C and pre-array syntax Fortran finds Fortran’s 1-based indexing to be a more natural fit, I would suspect.

[BeetleB]

> Also these comments just tell us about the background of the commenter, and nothing else

I was about to say something similar, but the last time I did, people got upset ;-)

That and people complaining about certain characters being allowed in variable names in some languages (e.g. hyphen, question mark, etc).

[ummonk]

Honestly, significant whitespace is a far more annoying design choice than 0 vs 1 indexing.