[squabble]

In my opinion, these are bad names and we would all have saved a lot of brain power if simple and clearly meaningful names were chosen.

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

[menage]

Agreed, they're not the clearest of names, particularly in a global cultural context. But they're not totally arbitrary like "type 1 error" and "type 2 error".

[zestyping]

The thing that this article seemed to be getting at was not just whether the names have meaning — I interpreted it to be specifically about whether two names are easily swappable. It's a dichotomy, but which way does it go?

"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.