Poll: what number comes at the beginning?

[jducoeur]

One of the most important concepts in CommYou's new integration with IM is the notion of a "thread slot" -- the number that is assigned to a particular thread of conversation. Since you are potentially juggling several conversations in a single IM window, you need an easy way to refer to a specific one.

At the moment, I'm allowing ten slots at any given time (which seems about as many as you can keep track of anyway). These are, of course, numbered 0 - 9. One of the first points made yesterday (by laurion) is that that's pretty geeky. Every computer science student knows that the number line starts with zero, but most other people in the world thinks it starts with one.

I suspect he's right, and am leaning towards simply slicing slot 0 away, so you get threads 1 - 9. But before I go changing the code, I figure I may as well do a quick survey of opinion among my admittedly-unrepresentative friends:
[Poll #1228967]

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

The other commenters so far have all made good arguments, but it seems to me that if you're geeky enough to be using LJ/Facebook/CommYou in the first place -- and y'all uber-geeks out there should realize that among hoi polloi of the rest of the world, that is pretty geeky, in and of itself -- then you're geeky enough to understand a number line that starts at zero.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Understand, sure. But I suspect if I had a list of these conversations that ran 0-4, I'd keep thinking I had 4 of them, even though I had 5. And that kind of regular minor annoyance can make folks rather fretful.

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

if you're geeky enough to be using LJ/Facebook/CommYou in the first place


noo,noo,noo,noo; they aren't geeky; they don't care what a number line starts with. Counting starts with one. 1 uno.

My sisters use Facebook. They start the count with one. Think like a kindergartener, not a g'rup; the app will be much easier to use.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Not true! Most of those who use Facebook that I know seem to be of the type who live for parties and wouldn't really get that the number line starts at zero- I'm towards the geekier end of the scale in my circle of acquaintences at school and I'm relatively surprised that I can follow all of this conversation.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

I have to join in with the masses saying no, until this thread, I had no idea that number lines started with 0.

[jducoeur]

It's a computer programming thing. For Technical Reasons, the most natural way to describe a list of things inside a computer is starting with 0 -- *inside* the program, things almost always work that way. So some of us programmers sometimes forget that the rest of the world doesn't think like that, because the start-with-0 law is so ironclad in programming.

(Really, I *do* know that intellectually; I simply goofed. While it seems to have been taken otherwise, this poll was mostly intended as, "this was a mistake, wasn't it?")

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Oh I figured out it was a programming thing, and that it clearly made sense to people who were that particular brand of geek. I just mostly wanted to add another voice to baron_steffan's assumption that if you use LJ, Facebook or CommYou, you're geeky enough in the right way to understand that.

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

It's not JUST a programming thing. Putting on my seamstress hat for a moment, I observe: