Comment by Certhas

Your second point is the main argument for me personally. Numbers in brackets always mean the same thing: the ordinal number of the references object in an ordered collection. In 0 based indexing you can think of the number as refering to the space between the referenced objects. But that is simply an additional mental image on top of the original one.

As a neat bonus, in Julia 1:5 is just the iterator for the numbers 1 to 5. So slicing is typically not some special syntax either. It all works rather nicely.