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Off by one solitude (fed.dyne.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Why the fuck would you spell it "1st" if it's not 1?

Edit: Which is not pronounced "onest". I think people might be missing the point here; I'm actually a fan of zero indexing.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I feel like the joke would've landed better if it said "first". I know it's pronounced the same way, but I'm gonna argue anyway that there's a subtle difference. I've heard 0th used in cs to describe what was at the 0-index, so in that context 1st would be"second", but "first" generally means "nothing before it". English is weird. I wonder if anyone knows whether the word "first" or "1st" came 1st (lol)?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Ordinal vs. cardinal. It's "first" not "onest", right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there's a difference. (In fact, it's basically a contraction of "foremost", and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)

    If we weren't implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for "second" (and still not "onend" or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Interestingly, we've got the same glitch in the Gregorian calendar, where the year 0 doesn't exist. So the 21st century started in 2001…

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Yup. We should really zero-index century names and years AD/BC as well, but we don't. If we were still using Roman numerals it would be no big deal, but we rarely do, so there's a confusing clash. I'm not sure if it was this programming humour community or another where I had a big exchange on the topic before.

    I suppose you could have some kind of positional system that's one-indexed, so 999AD = 1111999AD, and 2000 would be written 2111, but you'd have to completely redo the way arithmetic works, and that defeats the point a bit. And, the new 999 would not be our 999, because it's effectively base 9.

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