It doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the comments so far, but as a floppy-disk era developer I remember my mind was blown by the discovery that DEL was all-bits-set because this allowed a character on paper tape and punched card to be deleted by punching any un-punched holes!
Bit-level skeuomorphism! And since NUL is zero, does that mean the program ends wherever you stop punching? I've never used punch cards so I don't know how things were organized.