It is taken very seriously, though. This “issue” comes up very often when some people come and lecture others about how stupid the language they use is.

> May I recommend you this fabulous short essay by Dijkstra

That essay is not fabulous, it is obnoxious. I know you either love or hate Dijkstra and he enjoyed being a contrarian, but he’s unconvincing. The only point that surfaces during arguments on 0-indexing is iterating over 1..N-1 instead of 0..N. That’s basically what he wrote himself. This could have been solved with just a bit of syntax if it were really a problem, and it remains largely because C did it that way to simplify pointer arithmetics. It does not change the fact that for the vast majority of people, the first element in a list is, well, first.

The proper way of handling this is to allow for arbitrary indices, because you will always find contexts where a different scheme makes sense (e.g. iterating from -10 to 10 is sometimes natural, and would otherwise require some index gymnastics). Insisting that one narrow view is the correct one is just annoying.