> Computers really don't care. Literally. Same number of gates either way.

Eh. That depends; the computer architectures used to be way weirder than what we have today. IBM 1401 used variable-length BCDs (written in big-endian); its version of BCDIC literally used numbers from 1 to 9 as digits "1" to "9" (number 0 was blank/space, and number 10 would print as "0"). So its ADD etc. instructions took pointers to the last digits of numbers added, and worked backwards; in fact, pretty much all of indexing on that machine moved backwards: MOV also worked from higher addresses down to lower ones, and so on.