[willis936]

In defense of the poor hardware engineer: HDLs are not like other programming languages. You are literally writing a netlist of a circuit. Hardware engineers are hired to write FPGA code because it is a hardware design problem, not a software one.

[rowanG077]

I really disagree with this. HDLs are exactly like other programming languages. What in your mind makes HDLs fundamentally different to software languages? Your point about netlists doesn't convince me at all since you aren't creating netlists with a HDL. A description written in a HDL can be turned into a netlist.

[willis936]

Have you ever worked with HDLs before? The thing you are working on Is a netlist, not abstract code. As the name implies, you are describing hardware rather than abstract software. The layers of abstraction are ones that are built by the programmer (or defined in hardware block libraries) rather than ones from a language. HDLs do not have a single entry point. Every line of code runs concurrently with every other line of code. It simply is not like typical programming.

[rowanG077]

Yes I have used HDLs. You are working on a creating a hardware configuration. But you are not writing a netlist. That is like saying when you are writing a software program that you are "working on the machine code". The only difference between a HDL and "software" languages is a different set of restrictions. Every software language/framework or whatever also has unique restrictions. The restrictions HDLs have are not in any significant way tangibly different then those that exist in the software land.

You have software languages as well where "every line of code runs concurrently". Any dataflow framework for instance. That's not even to name functional languages where evaluation of statements can be done completely in parallel based on data dependencies.

Software is a lot more then the old c style run a program line by line until it hits the end of main().