Well, in many ways, they are going with the flow. They're targeting mathematicians, and R/Matlab users… all of whom use 1-indexed arrays. And, really, the kin

Well, in many ways, they are going with the flow. They're targeting mathematicians, and R/Matlab users… all of whom use 1-indexed arrays. And, really, the kinds of dictionaries you're used to are constructed with {} braces. The square braces hold more specifically-typed keys and objects. It's a very clever analogy to their typed/untyped arrays. And wonderful for performance. ["one"=> 1, "two"=> 2, "three"=> 3] # -> Dict{ASCIIString,Int64} {"one"=> 1, "two"=> 2, "three"=> 3} # -> Dict{Any,Any}