Matlab is 1-based. That's what the vast majority of scientific programmmers still use. Worrying about 0 vs 1 is just useless bikeshedding, really. I've done lots of index heavy operations in Julia and in Python, and it's easy either way.
No, not true at all. Engineering and academia are still solidly Matlab. You have to keep in mind that these people are not programmers, they are used to Matlab, and they don't want to learn another language. It's just a small proportion of new faculty and some grad students that use Python. Statistics is all R.
