If the author had contemplated this sentence before writing this pained and narrow-minded treatise: "Why thinking should start before writing", engineers would be slightly more capable of interacting with and designing for other human beings. Numbering is highly domain specific -- the concept of zero is not always relevant. And sometimes the lay perspective has primacy over others. I remember the intense arguments engineers had regarding when the new millennium was to start. There weren't celebrations on New Year's 2001 that could compete with the scale of those for the year 2000.