alt Hacker NewsI would bet that in the opposite circumstance you'd say the same thing:
"Is there any reason to not just switch to 0-based indexing if we could? Seems like 1-based indexing really exacerbates off-by-one errors without much benefit"
The problem is that humans make off-by-one errors and not that we're using the wrong indexing system.
No indexing system is perfect, but one can be better than another. Being able to do array[array.length()] to get the last item is more concise and less error prone than having to add -1 every time.
Programming languages are filled with tiny design choices that don’t completely prevent mistakes (that would be impossible) but do make them less likely.