> It's a bit of a joke, like arguing over tabs vs. spaces though.

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.

I dunno, it seems you misunderstood me, or idk. I clearly said that it is completely arbitrary to choose one over another, and expressing a preference over either one is just a way of poking fun at people who are anal about choosing a specific one. So there isn't really any disagreement, though I'm always amazed at what lengths people go to, to express what they think, while they're really just arguing about the definition of some thing.

> It is taken very seriously, though.

And those who do take it terribly seriously deserve being poked at ;)