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I also don't have a lot of need for scientific computing; Julia has the potential to be a really compelling replacement for Python for general purpose scripting.

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I do wonder if the 1 based indexing puts off a lot of developers. I have no issue with it but it seems to come up in most threads discussing Julia, here and on Reddit.

Personally I think it stems from a C influenced culture in terms of array indexing.

People from my age remember programming languages where you index from one, can select the base index or use enumerations as indexes.

Tooling, performance and libraries are much more important than base indexes.

Then again, I favored those C alternatives back when C wasn't an option at all. So I am biased.

I found it highly annoying, but understand why its there.

But can't you do a[begin] to reach the first item in a julia array? That should really abstract it away no?

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