<i>&gt;I really, really wish they had dropped the 1-based indexing<p>&gt;, my opinion on this topic is distorted because I spent a lot of time programming in C++</i><p>Mathematics-related programming[1] in MATLAB, R Language, Mathematica, SAS, etc all use 1-based indexing. Given that the originators of Julia are MATLAB users, it makes sense that they made a deliberate choice to keep 1-based indexing.<p>In other words, it was more important to grab mindshare from those previous math tools rather than appeal to C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Java&#x2F;etc programmers.<p>One outlier in the landscape of numerical programming is Python+NumPy&#x2F;SciPy in the sense that it uses 0-based indices.  While Julia also wants to be attractive to Python programmers, it still seems like the bigger motivation was programmers of MATLAB and other math software.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=02U9AJMEWx0&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=1m57s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=02U9AJMEWx0&amp;feature=youtu.be...</a>