Humans never chose to communicate via hex dumps either. We're making some concessions to hardware concerns here at the cost of human readability anyway, so one

Humans never chose to communicate via hex dumps either. We're making some concessions to hardware concerns here at the cost of human readability anyway, so one can debate whether endianness should also be considered that way. Protocol decoders are really great. Little endian is more natural for data structures. The least significant bit goes in the byte with the least address, and the most significant bit goes in the byte with the greatest address, so you never have to remember which way you're going, which is particularly nice when working with bitvectors and bit fields. "Left" and "right" can go either way, depending on which kind of diagram you draw, even on big-endian machines, so those words always end up ambiguous. Stick to bit significance and address order and everything is unambiguous and naturally inclined to little endian. I'm not sure what you mean by the bit shifting case. The 8 char ASCII sting compare is a neat trick with limited applicability these days.