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Comment by 2miles4chicken | Hacker News Reader

It's certainly faster: http://julialang.org/benchmarks/.

It is free/open source. And, it benefits from being a younger language and therefore has the hindsight of the quirks in Matlab's design. Coming from Python, the 1-indexed arrays are annoying but it's great for math.

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The 1-indexed arrays can sometimes be nice, but I've run into bugs so many times when translating the code into a language with 0-indexed arrays.

That's interesting, because the 1-indexed arrays are primary the primary reason I don't ever seriously consider using Julia (or Lua); I can only shudder and imagine the obnoxious number of off-by-one mistakes I'd make.

I think this is a mental block people have. I grew up on zero based arrays in C, but I can't say this has caused me any issues thus far using Julia.

I don't know how it is for others but for me I just into this mode where I think about Julia as doing math and I know in math you start at 1 for vectors and matrices.

Besides the way functions and APIs work, you seldom have to write code that really depends on the start index.

What you are saying is conjecture if you haven't tried Julia or Lua. The reality is that 1 based indexing is trivial compared to the difficulties of a complex program.

Out of curiosity, assuming that Julia magically had 0-indexed arrays, what would you use it for?

Yeah, it just feels wrong. Of course that's just habit and in fact starting counts at 1 is actually the more user-centric way of doing it.

I wish I could get used to Julia but for some reason I just think the source looks..ugly. Maybe it's my dark past with php that makes me shudder at the sight of avg(x) (instead of x.avg).

I know that's stupid (and the syntax is actually required for multiple dispatch). Maybe Julia and I should try couples' therapy.

On the other hand having cut my teeth programming in MATLAB and lua 1-based indexing is on of the things that endears Julia to me.

If I can switch between programming languages that use 0-based and 1-based indexing without getting confused, surely you could too. If you don't think that learning to use 1-based indexing is worth it, that's fair enough, but it's pretty low on my list of things that give me trouble when I translate code between languages.

Basically every mathematical/data science language uses 1-based arrays -- R, MATLAB, and Mathematica in addition to Julia. Probably because traditionally (and to a degree even now) the standard numerical language was FORTRAN.

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