If there are no convincing arguments one way or the other, then "what everybody else does" becomes the convincing argument. Why change established conventions for no good reason? There's no reason for curly braces to indicate control blocks and square braces to indicate indexing, but if a language swapped the two, what would you say?
Indeed, and if you add up all the users of 1-based languages (Fortran, Matlab, R, Excel, etc.) and 0-based languages (C, C++, Java, Python, etc.), I think you’ll find that the 1-based languages have vastly more programmers.
Going by popularity, 1-based indexing is the established convention.
Indexing is the primary operation in Excel and one of the first things you learn how to do in the language (selecting a range of cells). It’s how you refer to anything, by indexing into the global cell space.
Given Excel’s massive success and nontechnical user base, which again is larger than all languages combined, it’s hard for me to see 1-based indexing was a mistake. I have experience teaching novices how to program, and 0-based indexing is always a sticking point of confusion. So from my perspective, 1-based indexing is the right choice for excel given the user base and programming style.
More used in scientific computing, which was my point, because only programmers think of indexing based on offset instead of the first positive integer. Nobody outside of programming in C/Unix inspired languages starts counting at 0.
When someone wrote “Going by popularity, 1-based indexing is the established convention” and you replied “Yes, but not so much in scientific computing” I understood that as “1-based indexing is less used in scientific computing compared to general computing”.
