[bignerd_95]

Yes, I draw the heap starting at the top of the board and the stack starting at the bottom of the board and grow them toward each other. That works fine in a one-off explanation.

The problem is that most textbooks draw the opposite, so the student leaves my lecture, opens a book or a slide deck, and now “down” means a different thing.

It gets worse when they get curious and look at a real process with /proc/<pid>/maps. Linux prints mappings from low address to high address as you scroll down (which matches my representation). That is literally reversed from the usual textbook diagram. Students notice and ask why the book is “wrong.”

So I've learned I have to explicitly call this out as notation.

Same story as in electronics class still teaching conventional current flow (positive to negative), even though electrons move the other way (negative to positive). Source: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chp.... Historical convention, and then pedagogy has to patch it forever.