[allegedganon]

Funny, and beneath the joke lies a nice nugget of truth: the landscape of hardware design languages is a truly sad thing to behold and deeply hinders innovation in the space.

There are numerous attempts at fixing the problem, but all of them ring hollow as the big ASIC design shops basically are all relying on ancient languages.

Another thing that IMO has dealt a grave blow to the whole scene is a cultural one: people in the hardware business still haven't understood and digested the lessons of open source and sharing. The whole industry still operates on notions of "industrial secrets" and spends tremendous amounts of energy trying to hide how what they build works.

I mean if you need a example of how bad it still is, the dominant word still used to describe a chunk of functionality in that world is "IP".

Who in their right mind in the software industry would call a piece of code they wrote "intellectual property", as in "just download my IP and use it in your project" ?

[BrannonB]

If you think Verilog is bad, you should see the languages used by heart surgeons, civil engineers and rocket scientists. The language of human biology is ridiculously verbose without even a hint of polymorphism. ;-)

My point is that it's a little silly to evaluate hardware engineering through the lense of software engineering.

In hardware engineering the part that looks like "software" (what a HW engineer may refer to as the behavioral RTL) is a small component of the total design effort. The tradeoffs are all completely different.

Computer hardware engineering is much closer to designing a bridge than it is to writing a software application. Debating the best hardware-descriptor language is similar to debating whether bridge designers should use No. 1 or No. 2 pencils.

[krupan]

Sorry, but that comment makes it sound like you've either never used pencils, or you have never used verilog.

[BrannonB]

25 years of high performance chip design.

Perhaps you’re an FPGA guy? The tradeoffs are different in that world.

[allegedganon]

I am not claiming in any way that the problem we face in HW design are the same as the SW folks do. I most certainly agree that RTL is but a small chunk of the overall effort of designing a chip. But I am afraid my point that this chunk is in a terrible place still stands.

You have also entirely ignored my second point :)

[BrannonB]

Your second point was that HW engineers haven’t learned about sharing—as evidenced by the fact that they use a different term for it than SW does.

Again this is evaluating HW through a SW prism. Where’s github for bridge designers? rocket scientists? brain surgeons?

HW engineers share info in pretty much the same way that every other industry in the world does (except SW). The concepts are made available through patents, conferences, journals, and press releases. More detailed info is often made available through purchaseable IP.

Maybe it could be better, but there are good reasons that HW IP can’t be shared as easily as SW source code.