[adrianratnapala]

There's really no good argument for big-endian encoding except that it's the ordering that we humans use in writing. And not even always that. We call our numbering system "Arabic", but for the Arabs, it little-endian.

For some reason humans seem to want high powers on the left, even if it makes no sense in a left-to-right language.

Take polynomials, they are typically written big-endian

      ax^2 + bx + c

But infinite series have to be little-endian.

      c_0  +  c_1*x  + c_2*x^2 ....

If you think for a moment about how you would write multiplication, you will see the latter form is much easier to reason about and program with.