AndrĆ© Garzia made a nice blog post called āLua, a misunderstood languageā recently, and unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) a bulk of HN comments on it was about the age-old 0-based vs. 1-based indexing debate. You see, Lua uses 1-based indexing, and lots of programmers claimed this is unnatural because āevery other language out thereā uses 0-based indexing.
Iāll brush aside quickly the fact that this is not true ā 1-based indexing has a long history, all the way from Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Ada, Smalltalk, etc. ā and Iāll grant that the vast majority of popular languages in the industry nowadays are 0-based. So, letās avoid the popularity contest and address the claim that 0-based indexing is āinherently betterā, or worse, āmore naturalā.
It really shows how conditioned an entire community can be when they find the statement āgiven a list x, the first item in x is x[1], the second item in x is x[2]ā to be unnatural. :) And in fact this is a somewhat scary thought about groupthink outside of programming even!