Yeah, if positive was clockwise in trig, y = sin x would have a negative slope at x = 0, which I guess Albert Sine found distasteful.

(I made up Albert Sine. I don’t know that there’s anyone specific we can attribute the invention of trigonometric functions to. But I like to imagine him sitting at a desk scribbling right triangles by candle light and scratching his head as to how he’d go about actually calculating the sine, cosine, tangent, arcsine, arccosine, etc of various arbitrary values within his lifetime.)