Also, does it start with 0 or 1 (or -3023 for that matter)? As a programmer you would assume of course it starts at 0, but since this thread talks about "non-programmer" academic types I think it's worth mentioning. What if I want a range of 1-15, or 20-50, can I still use range()? I can't tell from the Python example but I can tell exactly what I would need to change with the Swift one to make it work exactly how I'd want.

Very true, and this is especially important in data science, where the majority of languages, other than Python, are 1 indexed (Matlab, Julia, R, FØRTRAN).

CS student here so not much of a highly valued input.

Once I knew these two facts, it didn't add much confusion.

1. Indexing starts from 0

2. Thus, range can be thought "from up to one before x", x here would be 15.

And I learned this pretty early and did not get confused later on.

You learned it for one language. Now imagine that you're working with a handful of languages regularly, some of which have 1-based indexing, some 0-based, some of which may have closed ranges, others half-open ranges.

If you're anything like me, you'll end up spending quite a bit of time looking up the documentation to the range operator to remind yourself how this week's language works again.