Much like turing completeness, you can build systems with any choice that "work", so an argument always has to be from aesthetics, which can include simplicity and "uglyness", but these aren't totally individual (you can get 99/100 people to agree on which of two schemes is "simpler"). Simplicity and beauty aren't something that even mathematicians dismiss as they can be trying to tell you something.

There's another argument, I can't remember if I originated it or read it but it's the one I find most convincing.

Consider that you have finite units of equal length 1 stretching away from you in a line. How would you specify to someone (using real-number measurements) to retrieve the first N=6, or describe the vector they occupy? You would say, take everything between [0.0, 6.0). If you use zero-based indexing, the numbering scheme specifying the interval is identical across both systems: [0.0, 6.0) => (python)[0: 6]== 0<=x<6. In real numbers the interval could be open or closed for this argument to work, because for there to be any elegant translation the integer upper bound has to be open. That's the only way you can keep the elegant transformation with 0 and 6. Caveat that thie works because you're numbering the real-number origin as 0 but try telling physicists that they're not to do that! O=(1,1,1) is an even more indefensible position.

So there's another mathematical argument that I either came up with or read elsewhere that feels deeply convincing to me. If there's 2 there's probably more, and here's the list of languages on wikipedia, you tell me which you'd rather work in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...

Sorry for the irate tone but I really think that on reflection and fair consideration this is an obvious one.