“On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace”, 1981-10-01 (; backlinks; similar):
Which bit should travel first? The bit from the big end or the bit from the little end? Can a war between Big Endians and Little Endians be avoided?
This article was written in an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late for peace to prevail again. Many believe that the central question of this war is, What is the proper byte order in messages? More specifically, the question is, Which bit should travel first-the bit from the little end of the word or the bit from the big end of the word? Followers of the former approach are called Little Endians, or Lilliputians; followers of the latter are called Big Endians, or Blefuscuians. I employ these Swiftian terms because this modern conflict is so reminiscent of the holy war described in Gulliver’s Travels.
…To sum it all up, there are two camps, each with its own language. These languages are as compatible with each other as any Semitic and Latin languages. All Big Endians can talk only to each other. So can all the Little Endians, although there are some differences among the dialects used by different tribes. There is no middle ground—only one end can go first. As in all the religious wars of the past, power—not logic—will be the decisive factor. This is not the first holy war, and will probably not be the last. The “Reasonable, do it my way” approach does not work. Neither does the Esperanto approach of switching to yet another new language. Lest our communications world split along theses lines, we should take note of a certain book (not mentioned in the references), which has an interesting story about a similar phenomenon: the Tower of Babel. Lilliput and Blefuscu will never come to terms of their own free will. We need some Gulliver between the two islands to force an unified communication regime on all of us.
Of course, I hope that my way will be chosen, but it is not really critical. Agreement upon an order is more important than the order agreed upon.
Shall we toss a coin?
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