I'm a weird case (electrical engineer with ~a BSc in CS as well). When I first saw the WWDC 2012 sessions about AutoLayout, I was blown away! After all these years dicking around with specific pixel sizes for things, and basically doing my own linear constraint solving on paper to make things work (web, mobile, desktop, etc), I just breathed a sigh of relief to see that it was finally done the right way. I've since done a few layouts with it and am super impressed, especially with the text DSL for specifying constraints. Sure, it's a little finicky sometimes, but that's generally when I haven't thought through the constraints well enough :)
