[sern]

I don't think it's helpful to refer to VHDL as "not programming". It is programming, just in an inherently parallel, declarative fashion rather than an imperative one. My favourite metaphor for programming in an HDL is to think of it as building a computer or writing a program using expressions in a spreadsheet.

[Gebetto]

I have a background in Electrical Engineering, and when coding in a hardware description language, I feel that instantiating and connecting entities is like drawing a hierarchical schematic but in text mode. And writing the RTL implementation of an entity is like giving requirements to the synthesis tools that I need a bunch of gates and flip flops that implement this functionality. When coding in some programming language, I have a completely different mindset.

Programming usually means coding in some language that will be compiled to machine language, and hardware description is so different kind of "programming" that I think it's dangerous to call it programming at all.