My own experience disagrees with your anecdote, but I guess it's different for everyone.
I learned programming by myself when I was a teenager, and 0-indexed never was an issue.
We learn very early on as kids at school that there are 10 digit numbers, not 9. You learn to write 0 before any other characters. On every digit pad, such as phone dial, there is a "0".
If I ask you the list of digit numbers, 0 is the first element.
There is nothing counter-intuitive about that in my opinion, even for a kid.
I learned programming by myself when I was a teenager, and 0-indexed never was an issue.
We learn very early on as kids at school that there are 10 digit numbers, not 9. You learn to write 0 before any other characters. On every digit pad, such as phone dial, there is a "0".
If I ask you the list of digit numbers, 0 is the first element.
There is nothing counter-intuitive about that in my opinion, even for a kid.