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.
just... 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.
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.