> Yes 1-based indexing is a mistake. It leads to significantly less elegant code - especially for generic code - and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.

Some would argue that 0-based indexing is significantly less elegant for numerical/scientific code, but that depends on whether they come from a MATLAB/Fortran or Python/C(++) background.

A decision was made to target the MATLAB/Fortran (and unhappy? Python/C++) crowd first, thus the choice of 1-based indexing and column-major order, but at the end of the day it's a matter of personal preference.

0-based indexing would have made it easier to reach a larger audience, however.

> and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.

The same could be said the other way around ;-)

lol. There's not much to fight since its a very personal problem how you want to write code. It's evident that all the capable programmers in the Julia community, have found satisfactory ways to get around it, so if you haven't yet, I don't see how that's a Julia problem ;) I can only say I haven't had a single problem with one based indexing in 12 years of developing Julia code. I also haven't run into many correctness issues compared to other languages I've been using. I think Yuri also has been using lots of packages which haven't been very mature. How on earth can you compare a 10 years old library with lots of maintainers with packages created in one year by one person? That's at least what Yuri's critic boils down to me.