[RandomName2020]

Anecdote evidence, but I am currently learning FPGA and VHDL, and find it not more difficult than "normal" C. Way more more expressive, for sure: a complete 8 channel PWM controller under 150 lines. Parallelism without locking feels very cool.

[greendragon]

I think VHDL makes things easier. Verilog has some fundamental nondeterminism: http://insights.sigasi.com/opinion/jan/verilogs-major-flaw.h... Still, HDL in general is probably on the order of difficulty as getting used to pointers. If you've already done a bunch of work with breadboards and logic gates it's even easier to grok. Of course a lot of people just instantiate a CPU core on the FPGA and program in C...