TL;DR: Start counting from one instead of zero. Like humans do.

Problems

• Bijection from real-world broken

• Cognitive load

• Overly implementation-oriented code

Solutions

1. Favor high-level declarative languages

Context

Low-level languages force you to think at a machine level.

Hardware turning machines were designed to use binary gates and start indexing at 0.

A few programming languages use one-based indexing, where indexing starts from 1.

These languages are known for being higher level and more declarative:

• Basic / Visual Basic

• Pascal

• Smalltalk

• Fortran

• Lua

• MATLAB

• R

• Julia

Sample Code

Wrong

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {    
    numbers := []int{10, 20, 30, 40, 50}

    for i := 0; i < len(numbers); i++ {
        // Iteration goes from zero to len-1
        fmt.Println(numbers[i])
    }
}

Right

numbers = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50];

% Looping through the array using one-based indexing
% from 1 to length
for currentIndex = 1:length(numbers)
    disp(numbers(currentIndex));
end

Detection

[X] Automatic

This is a language smell.

Exceptions

• Low-level optimized code

Tags

• Declarative Code

Conclusion

We need to think as humans when we code and not as machines.

Humans count from one.

Zero number was a brilliant discovery in math and science but it does not apply to everyday counting.

Relations

More Info

Wikipedia

Disclaimer

Code Smells are my opinion.

Credits

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

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Pay attention to zeros. If there is a zero, someone will divide by it.

Cem Kaner

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This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.

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My new book about clean code is available for pre-order.

You will find several recipes like this one with a higher level of detail