[AndresNavarro]

> Spreadsheets and FPGAs are two places where there's no focus on a "program counter".

I'll give you spreadsheets, but while it's not the "focus" you will very often see softcores and lots of state machines being used in FPGAs. Some things are just easier to reason about and write that way.

[mikewarot]

Yes, softcores are often used to set up peripherals, and some light duty computation, but the real time aspect of an FPGA is something best set up in Verilog or VHDL, or those type of things.