It's catering to Fortran developers. Matlab was also catering to Fortran developers (you can read up the history of Matlab). And I wouldn't discount HPC guys as non-developers.

That is a ridiculous argument.

It may be ridiculous, but I dislike it deeply and it's one of the reasons I don't want to switch.

I thought so too but it bothers a lot less now that the default style of iteration is "for x in y" instead of looping over indices. In fact I barely think about it.

And, yes, for math-y stuff that you are going to be reading off a book, it helps keep things more compatible.