I barfed at 1-based indexing for about a week, but now it is as natural as anything.
I would compare 0-based and 1-based indexing with whether you put semicolons at the end of each line or not. Either way doesn't really change the feel (semantics) of the language.
Also, fortan is 1-based, iirc, and a lot of numerical code is in fortan.
Oh, and many many beginning programmers and scientists have a hard time with 0-based indexing. Not sure why, but such you hear, so the choice is really not that odd.
It makes sense in certain context (and in languages like C that have a low-level mental model). For scientific computing at a higher level of abstraction where the mental model of a multidimensional array is a tensor, and not a memory offset location, zero-based indices really get in the way
Also have a look at https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl
I worry about someones ability to solve real problems in any language if they can't get their head around an +1/-1 when indexing into an array.
This. Think about what this signals to employers and interviewers if someone throws a hissyfit over this.
People should stop wasting time bikeshedding this insignificant detail, but for some reason it is to programmers like a red rag to a bull.
When you have to deal with a wide range of languages, stuff like this is small potatoes, compared to, say, indentation based structure. The latter can result in the completely non-obvious change of program flow due to a single errant space or tab.
So this "very big elephant" is, in reality, a nothingburger.
For me, the very big elephant in the room is the semantic formatting. It has and continues to trip me up time and again. A touch of a space bar can change the flow of a python program. That is a huge asteroid of a problem.
