From experience, you don’t need to not have a CS background to find TeX/LaTeX difficult or obscure to customize or extend.

Here’s a challenge to try (I hacked together something similar that only works in specific cases): write an environment where you get N columns in portrait page mode, with a vertical ruler, say, 12pt to the left of each column; respecting different paper sizes.

The amount of \makeatother, and what does that even mean??, will blow your mind