On endianness, I'm not making a claim that one or the other is "better" or "right" -- merely that little-endian architectures are pervasive in the current world, and so picking big-endian for a hypothetical new architecture would be unnecessarily forcing it to deal with "this software is buggy on big-endian" issues forever. Which is fine if there is some really strong reason your new architecture should be big-endian; but if it's mere aesthetic preference then the cost probably outweighs the benefit right now.