It might seem harmless, but the purpose of a joke is to draw a distinction between those who get it and those who don't, fostering a sense of community. In this "joke", the in-group is people who don't know something; the community ideal fostered there is that knowledge is undesirable, that anything that seems unintuitive to the uninformed mind is inherently ridiculous. The "joke" has no effect if it doesn't do this. Entertaining the idea without challenge is dangerous.

I only read one book, and it's a Good Book, don't you know!

Ok, I think I see the problem. To me, MSb (Most Significant bit) isn't an ordering at all, just a label that one particular bit has. To specify an ordering, you'd also need to say whether that bit comes first or last. This concept doesn't exist in computer memory because, as previously mentioned, bits in a byte aren't ordered in memory. I was thinking of the individual digits in a field (each Y in YYYY) as separate bytes in a word, so endianness order makes sense to think about; separate fields in this analogy were contiguous like struct fields. I think my mental model is sensible, since ISO 8601 is fundamentally a sequence of characters, which are all in an absolute order.

Hah. Church tried to ban it because it was "associated with illegal money trading", I remember that. What is it about maths that makes non-mathematicians think themselves qualified to judge matters they don't understand?

Right, and in data transfer every byte can be placed in an absolute order relative to every other. And the digits within the respective fields are already big-endian (most significant digit first), so making the fields within the whole date little-endian is mixed-endian.

I have iterated this several times, so I worry there's a fundamental miscommunication happening here.

You do have to look at it though: it takes up space on the left margin, pushing your code to the right. Plus, a decent syntax highlighter will make a Lisp's parens about as subtle as whitespace. (You might call that cheating, but remember, what we call "text" is just a sequence of voltages etched on a silicon wafer; what we see on our displays is already a monumental abstraction.)

I might not find a joke funny, or I might not have the necessary context to appreciate it; that's "not getting" a joke. If it's possible to have too much context to appreciate a "joke", it's at the expense of people who know more than the audience.

I think I almost understand what you're getting at. If I do, it's uncodifiable. You can't draft an organisational system with a clause that no one is allowed to use logical fallacies to defend it.

Right, and the most significant bit of the whole date is the first Y in YYYY, which we can't put at the end unless we reverse the year itself. So we can either have pure big-endian, or PDP-endian. I know which one I'm picking.

Your literal statement is also just wrong. The solitary implication of endianness is byte ordering, because individual bits in a byte have no ordering in memory. Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that's entirely orthogonal to memory. Hex readouts order nybbles on the same axis as memory so as not to require 256 visually distinct digits and because they only have two axes; that's a visual artefact, and reflects nothing about the state of memory itself. ISO 8601 on the other hand is a visual representation, so digit and field ordering are in fact the same axis.

Whoa there. I detest this post as much as you do, but there's no need to start throwing out baseless accusations. @[email protected] isn't funny at all.

Ok, so this is a "joke" which is only funny to people who do not understand the context, and moreover jump to insane, unsubstantiated conclusions rather than expending an infinitesimal measure of effort to understand something they haven't seen before. It's active mockery of the very concept of being open to new ideas.

The irony is a real foreigner could probably do maths better than them.

I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.

Except no because the digits themselves are still big-endian. That's nUxi.

If I'm not meant to think about it until understanding emerges, then that means it should be immediately understandable without thinking. It is not.

I think it is not. Certainly most projects aren't solely personal utilities, but devs working for fun rather than profit will almost inevitably produce something skewed towards their own tastes and skills. See: the presentation of any FOSS graphical app vs a paid equivalent.

That's a pretty weak definition. "Legitimate" especially is a vacuous term, and every form of democracy ever proposed is (theoretically) "accountable".

They really need to patch this. It's wreaked unbridled havoc on the meta.

How is that different from the spaces/tabs you type at the beginning of a line though?

The Hamiltonian using Hamilton's numbers? Now I think about it it is a bit silly that two entirely separate yet highly propinquitous concepts have such similar names. Physics really went downhill once humans started writing it down.