Since you mentioned children learning to count, I tried to find a general, widely known case that would be as applicable around the world, and I provided a stud

Since you mentioned children learning to count, I tried to find a general, widely known case that would be as applicable around the world, and I provided a study examining why 0 can be a difficult concept (which humankind developed very recently). The number of toddlers who are engineers in the sense I think you’re talking about is approximately zero, too. Furthermore, the widespread mathematical / scientific computing languages have used 1-based from FORTRAN through Matlab and Mathematica. Statistical papers are published with accompanying R code , very rarely with Python. If 1-based indexing is too hard to get used to, you may not be in the target audience. Anecdotally, I used C and Python well before started R, and I’m not really the smartest bulb in the box. I was annoyed for about a week. If you have the knowledge of what you will use Julia for, this hurdle seems very minor in my opinion.