In languages like C it's useful to have 0-based indexing because it's not really an index at all but a pointer offset. You don't do pointer math in languages like Julia and Matlab (and Fortran), but instead actual indexing, so 1 is a better place to start.

Also, 1-based indexing is easier to teach those new to programming, especially children. 0-based indexing is a significant stumbling block for people, since they are used to counting from 1, which leads to all kinds of off-by-one errors.