And its just so obviously correct.

    Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

    ...

    The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.

    ...

    Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

    Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering
    [The approximate reconstruction of the questions is left as an exercise to the reader.]

    ...

    No, I'm afraid that computer science has suffered from the popularity of the Internet. It has attracted an increasing —not to say: overwhelming!— number of students with very little scientific inclination and in research it has only strengthened the prevailing (and somewhat vulgar) obsession with speed and capacity.

    Yes, I share your concern: how to program well —though a teachable topic— is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmountable political problems.

Apparently Dijesktra loved using em-dash!

Generally I think this does answer the question about why functional languages don't dominate more than they do - although you could make an argument that JavaScript is a functional language, and it certainly is enjoying a lot of dominance these days. JS environments aren't known for being particularly efficient, though. To me, efficient use of resources is elegant, and a language needs to be able to do that.

I think you’re just biased to think that starting must “naturally” begin with 1.

Zero is just a good a place to start and some people do start counting from zero.

You're also wrong about there being no 0th mile. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/u-s-route-1-mile-0-sign

I guess the practice was influenced by computer science - I don't know of an example that precedes it, but one fairly early one I've found is Bishop and Goldberg's Tensor Analysis on Manifolds from 1968, with a chapter 0 on set theory and topology. Back then the authors felt the need to justify their numbering in the preface:

"The initial chapter has been numbered 0 because it logically precedes the main topics"

Quite straightforward.

There's also the "zeroth law of thermodynamics", which was explicitly identified long after the first, second, and third laws, but was felt more primary or basic, hence the need for an "ordinal before the first"

Then what do you call “here”?

The name for where you start from in this scenario is usually not required because it’s obvious what you mean and everyone understands the first block means you have to first walk a block, not that where you start is the first block.

So in that sense yes we have a zeroth chapter. That’s when you’re at the beginning of the first one but haven’t read all the way.

that's why we start from 0, not because of voltages, at least in compsci.