This. There's a reason the number 0 was only invented a couple of times. Human minds don't do well with the idea of nothing. It's not that there was nothing here - it's that there was no here.
No, the problem is not '0' not being a concept. There are two issues here, which are related but not the same. The conecpt of 'nothingness' is irrelevant to both:
1) Dealing with '0' as an ordinary number.
2) Using a positional number system, which requires a symbol or context for telling '1230' from '1023' and '1203', etc.
One tends to think that solving the first issue leads to the second. Solving the second implies in some way having already solved the first, due to the nature of positional systems.
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