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Honestly 0-based indexing is one of the most annoying things to teach. In sciences, people really don't care about programming arcana: I have never found anyone
by mangecoeur 6y ago
Honestly 0-based indexing is one of the most annoying things to teach. In sciences, people really don't care about programming arcana: I have never found anyone who found 0-based indexing natural or intuitive.
In fact, much of the vehemence in favor of it seem to be more about programmer shibboleths, to make some people feel they are in a special 'in-the-know' club (certainly if the r/programmerhumour reddit is anything to go by).
All I can do for scientists is tell them the advantage of learning a programming language outweighs the weirdness.
- jlg23 6y ago> I have never found anyone who found 0-based indexing natural or intuitive. It is pretty intuitive when thinking about natural numbers as steps along a path. Then, zero is the number that means "you are already there".
- mangecoeur 6y agojust... no. We are not talking about a number line here, we are talking about array indexing. That is a list of things that you count starting from the beginning. Like, no one lines up their children and says 'here is my Zeroth child'. There is a reason that Fortran, which was designed for science and engineering, uses 1 based indexing: because it makes sense when counting things, as opposed to dealing with some internal arcana of a computer's memory model.