Even Dijkstra weighed in on this:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

I've always found this a rather weak argument - he even implies that 2...12 is at least as clear (it being the starting point of the text).

I also thought I'd seen a longer text focusing more on the counting/indexing.

I still don't see the appeal of "element at zero offset" vs simply "first element".

I do agree that < vs <= etc can get messy. But outside of now fairly archaic programming languages I don't see the need. Just use a construct that handles ranges, like "for each element in collection/range/etc". (Or for math, "pattern matching" (or "for n in 1..m").

I believe that may be cited in the article (but its not in an obvious place :) )