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

[dsrtao]

It could start with 1 and end with 0, as a substitute for 10. Across most keyboards, the order is 1234567890.

But, haven't you heard of the Law of Non-Random Numbers? There can naturally be 0 of something, 1 of something, or N things. Anything else is an imposed limit. If you've got a power of 2 or (n^2)-1, at least that suggests a data representation limit. Round numbers in decimal sound really forced.

Personally, I rarely have more than 3 or 4 IM conversations open at a time, and almost always 1 or 2.