I am doubtful about the value of reason 2. "Intuitive", very often, just means "familiar", and I think that's the case here. It's not too difficult to get used

I am doubtful about the value of reason 2. "Intuitive", very often, just means "familiar", and I think that's the case here. It's not too difficult to get used to starting at 0, at which point there's no loss in "intuitiveness" from doing so. Reason 1 has more force. I don't run into it very often when transferring data from one language to another -- I don't do very much of that -- but I do when, e.g., translating between code and standard mathematical notation.