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Not just FORTRAN, but R and MATLAB also use one-based indexing. It's also, at least historically, the convention for matrix notation. IMO do whatever attracts more users, as that is what Julia needs most. Without a large community moving from MATLAB, R, and other languages, Julia will never take off.

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Erlang also.

In most functional languages using list indices are an anti-pattern. Pattern matching and generalized iteration is a much more elegant way to handle most things you would use an index for.

Well, sort of. Erlang has the array module, which does actually index at 0, intentionally to feel like an array from another language.

The primitive collection types index at 1, but, as you said, are almost never indexed that way. I'm not sure the motivation as to why, but the fact it feels clunky to use them that way is a benefit, as it raises resistance when you're using them wrong (as indexing them almost always is).

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