[jabbawookiees]

Or they could have saved themselves a CPU cycle every time they needed to index an array.

Don't get me wrong, non-zero-cost abstractions are great when they improve developer ergonomics commensurate to how much they cost. Garbage collection at the expense of GC overhead? Yes please. Classes and methods and inheritance at the expense of vtable lookups? Sure!

One-indexed arrays at the expense of either giving up the memory of the first item or always subtracting every index operation? Eh... I think I'd rather count from zero.