I had a ROFL moment when he discredited appeals to authority, and then progressed to note that it's conventional math notation - which is pretty much the same kind of logic.
Furthermore, mathematical notation is almost universally terrible. It's inconsistent, ambiguous, and has many undeclared dialects. Oh, and many people use 0-based index to boot, because, you know, whether that's conventional or convenient (largely orthogonal qualities alas in math) depends on the context.
I mean, I can sort of buy his argument that it's arbitrary, but then he also points out that there's at least one advantage to 0-based indexing, namely that works well in offset based scenarios (not just for pointers). So in which case is 1-based indexing convenient? Based on this blog post, never.
Furthermore, mathematical notation is almost universally terrible. It's inconsistent, ambiguous, and has many undeclared dialects. Oh, and many people use 0-based index to boot, because, you know, whether that's conventional or convenient (largely orthogonal qualities alas in math) depends on the context.
I mean, I can sort of buy his argument that it's arbitrary, but then he also points out that there's at least one advantage to 0-based indexing, namely that works well in offset based scenarios (not just for pointers). So in which case is 1-based indexing convenient? Based on this blog post, never.