To answer my own question, I came across this paper today which was I found quite insightful and had little to no math especially for a PLT paper:

Elementary Strong Functional Programming by D.A. Turner

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b60b/1c2e49ec6f574f220f162c...

Most of Michael Franz' papers, for example:

http://www.michaelfranz.com/

e2e argument:

http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/rfc/csr-rfc-185....

Unix:

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/unix.pdf

or pretty much everything here: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa17/cse221-a/readings.html

CS can be pretty broad.