While many languages follow a 0-indexed convention, as you see here, not all do. Another couple of cases I run into are Postgres arrays, and switching between “first”, “second”, and “nth” in Clojure.
If it helps, you can think 0-indexed as referring to the offset, and 1-indexed as referring to the position. It’s a shame to dismiss the entire language due to what one might argue is a minor aspect.
To be clear, I’m not calling Clojure 1-indexed: I provided “nth” and “first” as examples of contrasting 0- and 1-based conventions; in this case within the same language.
Clojure being a lisp also has different enough syntax it is easier to jump back and forth because you're doing way more context switching. Lua looks enough like other c-style languages you can forget it is 1 based and make all sorts of nasty mistakes.
You can certainly argue it is unfair, but it is still something that increases the risk of mistakes.
I mostly write in Java for work. Back to the good old high school days, I spent 2 years learning programming in Pascal (yes, Turbo Pascal for DOS!), so seeing arrays started at 1 is not something strange for me :)
Of course, in Pascal you actually can pick any number where the index starts/end.
Totally agree with you. Zero-indexed arrays are one of those language design dogmas that are simply set in stone, really awkward to switch between languages when Lua has such a fundamental difference of opinion.
They don't have to, since Lua tables are hash sets and you can use anything as a key. You can start them at 0 if you want. table[0] = "foo" is valid and works. The downside is you have to add '-1' in a few places, but it's not as many as you'd think. All of my Lua code uses zero based arrays. I think the only place I had to add -1 was initializing numeric for loops.
