You might also be interested in CMU's introductory curriculum in the same vein which is somewhat less extreme and has a particular focus on parallelism as the standard case of computing. http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/intro-curric...

EWD831 explains zero indexing. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

However after the list he states

  "And with the sixth example I have reached imperceptibly but unavoidably,
  the most hairy part of this talk: Educational consequences." 

which is incorrect as item 6 is actually the 7th example. Zero based indexing requires that the counter be updated after appending and the counter be referenced for the cardinal value of an item. (ie. item 6 is 7th in the list).