The opposite would be true for a large swath of people coming from scientific computing backgrounds if Julia defaulted to 0-based indexes. That said, in my experience people doing scientific computing have a poorly calibrated sense of what constitutes “hard.” I’m sure plenty of breakthroughs born of brilliant and horrifying code were created over sleepless weekends by grad students who didn’t understand that what they wanted to do was a mental tax.
I guess I don’t hear a lot of people doing scientific computing complain about indexing schemes. I prefer 1-based indexes, but 0-based indexes is a small and trivial issue in my list of grievances against, say, Python.
TaylorSeries.jl is a great example of this. x = x_0 + x_1 t + ... Then indexing into it with x[0] would give the zero-th order Taylor coefficient.
I guess that's true, from my experience Julia's way is simply less readable. It also make IDE autocomplete much more useful.
> A lot of relevant math is 1-indexed.
Initially I kind of liked it and disagreed with people who didn't. But as I used Julia over time, I regularly encountered situations in which it was really frustrating and enacted a mental tax. The opposite never happens.