This is the popular understanding. I've seen arguments against this claim. (e.g. "er" are frequent in english, and adjacent in qwerty). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...
This doesn't really hold if you see that 0 was to the right of 9 when the first number was 2, not 1.
You absolutely could need a 0 before you got to 10. 1.01, etc. Unless you're saying decimals aren't "normal".
> The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a (mental or spoken) counter by a unit for every element of the set
I was not the one who posted a Wikipedia link. I was only responding to the fact that the Wikipedia link did not support the prior poster's claim.
> Counting is counting things. For example sheeps. You don't have 0 sheeps. Either you have 1 or 2 or 3 or you don't have any.
Not having any sheep is literally having 0 sheep.
Only if you ignore the difference between having and not having.
Age in most countries starts with 0 but not all.
Still, I think one-based is best considered “normal”
If users here genuinely believe that, then I trust if I sell you a product for £1.01, you will give me £2?
0s are fundamentally used in normal counting.
So you'd count out 1 pound and 1p, 1 pound and 2p... 1 pound and 9p, 1 pound and 10p - so you don't need the zero until 10.
In other words, you start mentally counting from your smallest unit of precision in use.
This is a fun thought exercise, but what a pointlessly pedantic tangent this thread took…
I agree, in practical terms you're counting two things - pennies and pounds. You need a zero for the pennies counter before you need a two for the pounds counter for sure.
But you don't count 'I have one hundredth of a pound, I have one fiftieth of a pound, I have three hundredths of a pound, I have a twenty-fifth of a pound' and so on.
I appreciate that things like Benford’s law exist, but I don’t really buy into the idea that people put that much thought into it, when the more obvious answer is simply: “the first number is 1”.
QWERTY wasn’t designed because of some deep academic analysis of typing patterns — it was just to spread out frequently used letters so the mechanical arms didn’t get jammed.
It’s nice to think that all the standards we have today are a result of some deep thought, A/B testing, and a full committee review and approval of the design, but in reality it’s most often just what happened to work “well enough” at the time (evolution instead of intelligent design).