It depends on the use-case. A majority of Photoshop users probably only use it for occasional and singular tasks, like resizing an image for sending it via email, or retouching a good photo with bad exposure.
On the other hand some users have a need to do batch processing and in that regard Photoshop is surely limited. Also, Photoshop is so god-damn effective in 80% of the tasks that most users never learn the mechanics of useful effects like smart-sharpening (just an example), which is really bad because the same techniques for doing a manual smart-sharpening can be used for lots other effects.
Do note that Photoshop does have scripting support, but I don't know if it is an afterthought or not (and this does matter).
Are Visual Studio users just operators of an IDE?
Many of them are operators and it's freaking painful to watch.
We already have Latex to substitute for Word
Well, actually Microsoft has yet to create a replacement for Latex. The layout of a Word document gets broken a lot depending on the fonts installed, on the Word version you have or even because of the printer drivers you're using. I even saw the same document rendered differently on the same machine, changed from one application instance to another. Granted it was a badly formated document, but that's just sad.
Latex is still the only general-purpose solution for producing high-quality documentation that is consistently rendered well across devices and that can be properly translated into PDF or whatever format you want without splitting hairs. It's also much more productive for expressing mathematical formulas.
Lynx to substitute for Firefox
This comparison is not fair because HTML itself was meant to be rendered, not read directly.
However, I still don't see professional designers / developers using WYSIWYG tools for writing HTML, like say, Dreamweaver. They may draw the layout in Photoshop, but writing HTML? That's done by hand, unless you're speaking about incompetents. That may change but after more than 20 years after the web was invented, the fact that no WYSIWYG editor is capable of being good enough for the task truly speaks volumes.
Oh please. Don’t compare Latex to Word, compare it to InDesign. Word is word processor with some typesetting functionality crammed into it, certainly not the ideal tool for creating beautifully typeset documents.
Latex is awesome if you stick to the (very sensible) defaults. It basically creates beautifully typeset documents for people who have no idea about typesetting. (That’s a good thing, by the way.) It’s not all that great if you want to go very far beyond that and in that respect InDesign runs circles around it.
I agree. I find Latex very limiting, in the sense that anything that falls outside of its (admittedly extensive) library of functionality is nigh impossible to do. Latex has a system of "environments" and a box model that satisfies the basic use case of spitting out a nicely typeset article, but it's not the tool I would turn to if I wanted to precisely justify a paragraph underneath an image (the above comment is correct: look to InDesign or something similar).
Latex (or more specifically, TeX) was groundbreaking for its kerning and typeface support. It still has the most extensive system for unambiguously typesetting complex mathematical equations. It appeals to a certain kind of person who wants to have a canonical source in plaintext controlling layout. But you're kidding yourself to say that it is the most flexible and powerful tool for typesetting on the market today.
>> Are Visual Studio users just operators of an IDE?
>Many of them are operators and it's freaking painful to watch.
And many of them create awesome games, OSes, applications and websites that hundreds of millions of people find useful and enjoy. Funny how an open-ended tool works, isn't it?
>Well, actually Microsoft has yet to create a replacement for Latex.
They have EPS.
>This comparison is not fair because HTML itself was meant to be rendered in a graphical interface.
So you mean GUI is for consumers and CLI is for creators? But is Photoshop CLI or GUI? What about Eclipse?
Regarding Visual Studio operators, I don't think you and bad_user are talking about the same people. I suspect you would eventually find, if you talked it over more, that the people he labels as "operators" are not the ones creating the awesome games, OS's, and other software.
"Creators" don't use machine opcodes or punch cards anymore.
We already have Latex to substitute for Word and Lynx to substitute for Firefox.