As a layman, it is a personal aspiration to be able to understand this precise paper. It's very appealing to be able to express and reason about the related problems of complexity and edit distances using a generative(?) notation like lambda calculus that you can hack on in accessible languages like Haskell.

I also like that the citations include Emperor's New Mind; Godel, Escher, Bach; the Brainfuck homepage, and Haskell. The effects of these ideas on a couple generations of young minds is bearing fruit.

It feels like we're on the brink of gamifying a lot of important math.