[ogogmad]

A lot of formulae start from 1 too. And in linear algebra, most of them do.

It's like driving on the left side of the road instead of the right side of the road. Inconsistency is what makes it painful.

[noobermin]

I am convinced a good fraction of the off by one errors in C like languages comes from 0 indexing. The ith element is found after traversing i+1 elements and that fact leads to mistakes all the time. With 1 indexing the numbers line up.

[hpcjoe]

I agree. There's far less of a cognitive load for developers associated with representing an expression as written, if you don't need to mess with indices, in order to accommodate the language and its vagaries.

One should not need to adjust the way one expresses an algorithm, because of opinionated language design decisions. Put another way, languages designed for scientific/engineering computing won't have a hard/fixed opinion about things that shouldn't be worried about.