Endianness Memes

The eternal battle between Big-Endian (BE) and Little-Endian (LE) processors, illustrated perfectly by... people walking upside down? For the uninitiated: endianness determines how bytes are ordered in memory. Big-endian puts the most significant byte first (like reading a number left-to-right), while little-endian puts the least significant byte first (reading right-to-left). The comic shows a BE person trying to communicate with an LE person who's literally upside down, speaking in reverse syntax: "Processor? Central the to way the me tell you could lost. I'm" and "Much! Very you thank." After 15 years in systems programming, I still have nightmares about debugging network protocols between different architectures. Nothing like spending three days tracking down a bug only to discover it's a byte-order issue. Endianness: the original "works on my machine" problem.

The eternal computer science debate that makes absolutely no sense to normal humans: endianness. On the left, the logical person crying because "end" should refer to what comes last (little-endian should be MSB first). On the right, Danny Cohen smugly enjoying the chaos he created by naming it backwards - where "big end" refers to the most significant byte coming first. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how multi-byte values are stored in memory. It's like arguing whether to read a number from left-to-right or right-to-left, except we've been fighting about it since the 1980s and nobody will ever surrender.