[naikrovek]

> I think the idea was to make it look "familiar" to engineers

I'm not so sure. I'm fairly certain that at least VHDL existed before FPGAs were invented. I think they are programming language-like so that they can be somewhat easily verified for syntax errors and undergo some static analysis.

You are 100% correct that these languages don't match up with the type of work you use these languages for. I find C# and Go (and other languages) to be pretty intuitive in a lot of ways, and HDLs are the exact opposite of intuitive, to me. I am sure it would be easier for me to learn to speak, write, and read Icelandic than it would be for me to learn VHDL or Verilog.

[anyfoo]

Languages don't have to look like C or Ada in order to do syntax checking and static analysis on them. In fact, the latter arguably works better on languages like Haskell...