Because it's intuitive that an array contains an element before the first element?
Furthermore it depends on what you're doing with that first centimeter. In many instances the first centimeter is correctly considered to be 0.5
How about I drop a link about Einstein Notation with a curt observation that there are good reasons it uses both zero and one indexing simultaneously?
As I said it depends on how you are thinking about things. Indexing makes sense to people who are focusing only on the machine.
"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." (Hamming)
Machines and notation are both tools. Aesthetics do matter particularly for tools used for thought.
There is no correct answer and imposing one tool's limitations on everything is not useful. Particularly not "just because Dijkstra said so".
Sometimes 0-indexing works well. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes 1-indexing works well, sometimes it sucks.
I did in fact give you a reference. The fact that it's irrelevant to you and dismissed as merely "aesthetics" and that you think a computer scientist is the domain expert of all science tells me everything that needs to be said--you never deal with questions of correctness beyond mere transcription.
What I said is that moving from Octave/Matlab to python's zero indexing sometimes does truly suck. And I mean it. That doesn't mean 1-indexing never sucks or that I am inaware of Dijkstra's opinions. Having to arange(1, N+1) or 1:N+1 or whatever everywhere isn't eliminating off-by-one errors.
Matlab and Octave and FORTRAN etc are domain languages designed for linear algebra. They are of course going to be more convenient for their domains.