We need less powerful languages
Yeah, that&#x27;s what we need for writing the same bored boilerplate CRUD all over again, though note that those less powerful languages end up being so painful to use that we eventually end up machine-generating most of the code (see: Java, HTML, CSS).<p>Sometimes we also need languages for exploratory work...<p>But anyway:<p>&gt; <i>In my years of software development, I&#x27;ve found that clients and users often ask for “free text” fields. A free text field is maximally powerfully as far as the end user is concerned — they can put whatever they like in. In this sense, this is the “most useful” field — you can use it for anything.</i><p>&gt; <i>But precisely because of this, it is also the least useful, because it is the least structured. (...) The longer I do software development involving databases, the more I want to tightly constrain everything as much as possible.</i><p>And that&#x27;s <i>precisely</i> why they want that free-form text field. That&#x27;s why people still use Excel instead of whatever database solution their IT department bought&#x2F;prepared - because it doesn&#x27;t limit them to particular poorly understood interpretation of their workflow that was outdated last week. Real world changes, requirements of the job change, and there&#x27;s nothing more annoying than be stopped dead in tracks because some smartass from IT thought that this particular field should always be a number...<p>Use text fields unless you&#x27;re absolutely, positively sure the constraints you want to impose are valid and will never change.