It's just the convention we've adopted for bit positioning. To the programmer, it doesn't matter since you never actually see sub-byte data, so we just conventi

It's just the convention we've adopted for bit positioning. To the programmer, it doesn't matter since you never actually see sub-byte data, so we just conventionally use the same meaning of shift "left" and shift "right" opcodes regardless of byte-endianness or how the CPU itself arranges the bits. So if we had followed the original Indian endianness, then a shift "left" would divide by 2 and a shift "right" would multiply by 2. All of our troubles stem from not swapping the digits around when we adopted the Indian/Arabic number system in the 10th century - we had to keep up the convention at first because it was compatible, and later because it's "natural".