It seems clearly the motivation was to be in line with other mathematical languages. But then time and again I see people say Julia is supposed to replace Python in the future. Well, you've just set yourself up for a little fight there because I'd say the vast majority of programmers are used to 0-based by default, and they're not going to dick around and install packages and crap to change that default behaviour, least of all when trying to be convinced that some new language is superior.
It seems clearly the motivation was to be in line with other mathematical languages. But then time and again I see people say Julia is supposed to replace Python in the future. Well, you've just set yourself up for a little fight there because I'd say the vast majority of programmers are used to 0-based by default, and they're not going to dick around and install packages and crap to change that default behaviour, least of all when trying to be convinced that some new language is superior.