Signatures do have similar problems to certificates. But Gemini doesn't avoid them either and often recommends TOFU certificates. I think the comment's point was that digital signatures ensure identity but are unsuitable for e-commerce, a leading source of enshittification.
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.
Town, outside, and dungeon represent decreasing levels of safety. In most games, players want a clear indication of how much danger they are in just walking around. Some games, like Dark Souls, do blur these lines. I think it would be easy to go overboard.
This strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.
It takes a very thoughtful approach to introducing an increasingly complex Scheme implementation. I doesn't shy away from the complexity that many LISP implementation tutorials try to push under the rug.
Syntactic sugar can sometimes fool us into thinking the underlying process is more efficient or streamlined. As a new programmer, I probably would have assumed that "storing" `data` at each step would be more expensive.
I'm not sure what you're asking. All those things are still out there. There are IRC chat rooms, forums, communities focused on building personal websites, and more. If you're asking how to feel what you felt all those years ago, I'm afraid you're out of luck. You can blame the world for changing, but you changed as well.