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Dijkstra conveniently ignored the other situations where 1-based works out better than 0-based. For example, getting the least element of the array, or iterating backwards over the array.

This reminds me of that somewhat famous observation about the bright scientists working to increase clicks at Google/FB instead of finding cures for diseases and such.

So much brain power to defend something that existed a long time ago and was adopted as some kind of law of the Universe when there is clearly no good reason to be this way today other than "it's just how it is" and every new programmer has to pass for a quick phase where the 1-based it beaten out of his mind.

Bit short-sighted of him to only consider positive array indices IMO. Lua allows them to be negative.

Lua also allows floating point indices. In fact, any value can be an index into a table. That means any number, string, True/False, function reference, thread (coroutine) reference, table reference, "userdata" reference (usually a pointer to a C object), or nil can be an index.

Correction, any value except nil can be an index into a table. https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#2.1