[LessDmesg]

I started reading but stopped when I saw "succ n" and "prev n". Unary numbers are so academic and disconnected from reality that I lose interest in any paper that uses them. Lambda calculus makes me yawn too. Guess I'll be making a programming language on my own to see how far I get without reading TAPL or any CS papers :-)

[quickthrower2]

I found TAPL too hard so I know where you are coming from. I knocked up this programming language in a few hours. https://github.com/mcapodici/badlanguage

[LessDmesg]

It's not so hard as it is hard to read because of the formalism. Instead of introducing lambda calculus and the fraction-like thingies with Greek letters, CS scientists should just use Python and write an implementation on the fly.