While many languages follow a 0-indexed convention, as you see here, not all do. Another couple of cases I run into are Postgres arrays, and switching between “first”, “second”, and “nth” in Clojure.

If it helps, you can think 0-indexed as referring to the offset, and 1-indexed as referring to the position. It’s a shame to dismiss the entire language due to what one might argue is a minor aspect.

I mostly write in Java for work. Back to the good old high school days, I spent 2 years learning programming in Pascal (yes, Turbo Pascal for DOS!), so seeing arrays started at 1 is not something strange for me :)

Of course, in Pascal you actually can pick any number where the index starts/end.

Totally agree with you. Zero-indexed arrays are one of those language design dogmas that are simply set in stone, really awkward to switch between languages when Lua has such a fundamental difference of opinion.

They don't have to, since Lua tables are hash sets and you can use anything as a key. You can start them at 0 if you want. table[0] = "foo" is valid and works. The downside is you have to add '-1' in a few places, but it's not as many as you'd think. All of my Lua code uses zero based arrays. I think the only place I had to add -1 was initializing numeric for loops.

Since Lua “arrays” are just tables with numerical keys, couldn’t you just start at 0 if that’s your preference?

For me it was the fact that the array ends at the first 'nil' you store in it. 1-based arrays I could get used to; that was just maddening.