- "Little-endian" vs. "big-endian": Does "little-endian" mean the little part is at the end or at the beginning? Why not "minor-first" and "major-first"?
- "Type 1 diabetes" vs. "type 2 diabetes": Why not "insulin deficiency" and "insulin impotence"?
The cultural reference in the names preserves the opinion that the choice of byte order is not worth fighting about. But this is an extra piece of information that's not needed.
Moreover, the choice of the word "end" is unfortunate, since it means both "boundary" (as in the 2 ends of an egg) and "conclusion" (as in the end of a transmission).
To make matters worse, they chose to have "little endian" refer to the case where the big (most significant) byte is at the end of a transmission.
Better names might be something like "smallest-first byte order".
Edit: If you are confused, think of it this way:
Little-endian = little end first
Big-endian = big end first
"Little-endian" is the perfect example: it clearly has something to do with little and big, but it's impossible to tell from the words which one means LSB-first and which one means MSB-first.
When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Your “logical” is counter to how English-speaking people write numbers.
Huh? When I read 24, "twentyfour", the highest value is on the left, followed by less high values on the right, and spoken in that order.
It's actually different in other languages, in dutch for example I would say "vierEnTwintig", or "four and twenty" translated directly, so saying the least high value first. (... However this is only for the two digits, because upwards we'll say "honderdVierEnTwintig", or "hunderd four and twenty")
As evidenced by the MM/DD/YYYY ("middle-endian") year format that a significant part of the English-speaking world uses, "logical" and "traditional" can mean different things.
The fact that I can't think of any arbitrary-precision library which stores its numbers in big-endian format is evidence that LE is the logical one. Yes, it looks odd in a hexdump, but that's not something you need to deal with often and if you do, you get used to it anyway.
All of Europe uses DD/MM/YYYY (Germany uses dots instead of /) and I believe most (if not all) of South America too.
Chinese and Japan effectively use YYYY-MM-DD because of how it's written normally, YYYY年MM月DD日. A lot of the tech and business world also use YYYY-MM-DD because it's an ISO standard, and makes sorting easier if you assume left-to-right reading order.
However, there are two interesting observations:
* Most of the world reads left-to-right, but uses Arabic numerals which is right-to-left. So, most of the world uses big-endian Arabic numerals when in the original language it was little-endian. Also strange that when we say "Arabic numerals", we also don't use their numerals, only their system...
* The difference in US date formats compared to the rest of the English speaking world boils down to how the dates are spoken. In US English, it's typical to say e.g. "January 10", whereas in British English this is practically unheard of. But this explains why to an American "MM/DD" feels more natural. In Britain, sometimes people might say "January the 10th", but "10th of January" is far more natural. This is why we prefer "DD/MM" because it's a natural abbreviation. You can still see vestiges of the earlier British-style usage in US English, e.g. "4th of July" which is ironic for the date that should be least British is pretty much the only one that's still said the traditional British way!
You say clearly little endian means you start with the little part. But why couldn’t it be that little endian means the end is the little part?
Endian is not a word that means anything apart from the Gulliver’s Travels story or the order of bytes.