One counterargument is that in natural language, we tend to talk about numbers 2 to 12 and not the interval 2 <= x < 13. The argument for the latter versus the former is probably Dijkstra's weakest: the claim is merely that this makes the empty range "unnatural." The former convention implies one-based indexing for the same reason that the the latter implies zero-based indexing.

In Julia, the natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 are expressed as 2:12 and the empty range starting at 2 is expressed as 2:1.