File format Memes

Nobody in the history of programming has ever chosen an endianness based on performance. But choosing big endian because it "looks pretty" in a hex editor? That's the kind of arbitrary decision that haunts codebases for decades. Some dev probably made this call back in 2003 and now there's an entire team maintaining compatibility layers for it. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how bytes are ordered in memory. Little endian (0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04) reads as 0x04030201, while big endian reads naturally as 0x01020304. Absolutely nobody cares until you need to transfer data between systems, then suddenly everyone cares very much .

Top panel: You, a mere mortal, struggling to create a binary file format from scratch like some kind of masochist. Bottom panel: The hex editor descending from the heavens with divine radiance, ready to save you from your own hubris. Nothing quite humbles you like realizing the tool existed the whole time while you were banging rocks together trying to manually format binary data.