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submitted 2 days ago by ekZepp@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] threeonefour@piefed.ca 23 points 2 days ago

I always see those videos where people give kids a walkman or a rotary phone and ask them to figure out what it is or how it works. I'm imagining some medieval merchant handing me an abacus and laughing because I can't figure it out.

[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago

It's little endian, so the beads on the far right are used to outnumber the big endian beads at the top on the woke left. After several computations, the middle section is just gone

[-] TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

Tried reading about endianness once. Pretty sure it can't be dumbed down enough for my brain.

[-] zerofk@lemmy.zip 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You know how some languages write left-to-right, and some rught-to-left? Endianness is that, for numbers.

Or another analogy is dates: 2025/12/31 is big endian, 31/12/2025 is little endian. And 12/31/2025 is middle endian. Which makes no sense at all because the middle is, by definition, not an end.

[-] TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

I stand corrected. No idea what I was reading (several years ago), but whatever it was made it seem way more complicated. Maybe it was just an explanation from somebody who didn't know.

[-] wheezy@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

Likely it was being explained in the context of binary number representation as it is primarily important in computer architecture. If you're not already familiar with that then it was probably confusing explained in that context.

[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Big Endian    Little Endian:
 
 "1010"         "1010"
  ||||           ||||
 [1248]         [8421]
 
 1+4=5          8+2=10

Depending on whether the order of binary comes from the left (Big Endian) or from the right (Little Endian), the binary number of "1010" can equal 5 or 10

[-] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 days ago

Ouch. I had to learn endianness once to solve a real life serialization bug. It sucked. I learned it for just long enough to correct the code for the corner cases involves, and then slept and forgot everything about it.