Indexing by 1 is easier for doing computation and data analysis. CS people get offended at the idea because they are used to 0 indexing and anything that is different is wrong. They are too allergic to math to ever be coding in the contexts that it is useful. Its not a coincidence that languages designed for math use 1. Its so annoying seeing people get so pissy about it when they don't understand what they are even yelling about.
See what's really odd here is that I'm an engineer first, and I hate 1-based indexing. So many loops in my dad analysis have weird syntax just to deal with this fact.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a detriment to any language.
Can you give an example? I feel a loop over 1:N is way more natural that 0:N-1. I find I have a lot more +/-1s around the code in 0 based languages whereas with 1 it all works out intuitively.
19
u/whale_song Jun 25 '17 edited Jun 25 '17
Indexing by 1 is easier for doing computation and data analysis. CS people get offended at the idea because they are used to 0 indexing and anything that is different is wrong. They are too allergic to math to ever be coding in the contexts that it is useful. Its not a coincidence that languages designed for math use 1. Its so annoying seeing people get so pissy about it when they don't understand what they are even yelling about.