Yes, exactly. Maybe an example that's easier to visualize is when you learned to do arithmetic as a child. If I gave you a bunch of numbers to add like 57, 9,

Yes, exactly. Maybe an example that's easier to visualize is when you learned to do arithmetic as a child. If I gave you a bunch of numbers to add like 57, 9, and 318 the first thing you would do is right justify them all. For any math operation, you start at the least significant digit and work up. This is ultimately equivalent to the int32/int16 example you gave -- if you are trying to operate on numbers of different length you have to first ensure that their LSBs line up. Little-endian is like writing your decimal integers right-justified on the blackboard. So little-endian is (slightly) more convenient for machines and big-endian is (slightly) more convenient to humans reading memory dumps. The unfortunate thing is that "network byte order" is big-endian so it's still the traditional endianness to use for wire protocols or on-disk formats. In my own designs I've switched to specifying fixed-width integers as little-endian which makes more sense for 99.9% of computers today.