[kimmeld]

System Verilog is the C++ of chip design. It sucks, but it’s everywhere and tied into everything. Like C++ there are so many ways to write dangerous code. We do need a new chip design language but it’s going to take something special to move the needle.

[bb88]

30 years or so ago, there were a handful of programming languages in regular use: C/C++/Assembly/Ada/Fortran/Pascal. Now there's 100x more that people use professionally.

I always wondered what would happen if hardware engineers bothered to learn compiler theory. Maybe this could have been a solved problem decades ago.

[vrinsd]

This is a pretty heavy handed statement -- there are plenty of "hardware engineers" who know plenty about compiler theory and/or have contributed significantly to it. A similarly flippant comment might be "if software engineers only understood hardware better we might have smartphones that last a month on a charge and never crash".

The challenge with hardware is that unlike "traditional" software which compiles to a fixed instruction set architecture, with hardware you might literally be defining the ISA as part of your design.

In hardware you can go from LEGO style gluing pre-existing building blocks to creating the building blocks and THEN gluing it together, with everything in-between.

The real crux of the problem is likely our modern implementation of economics -- a CS graduate who has base-level experience can bank roll a crazy salary that some guy who might have a BSEE, MSEE and PhD in Electrical Engineering ("hardware") will be lucky to get a job offer that's even enough to cover costs of education.

Until the "industry" values hardware and those who want to improve it, you'll likely see slow progress.

P.S.

VHDL (a commonly-used hardware description language) is more or less ADA. Personally I think the choice of ADA syntax was NOT a positive for hardware design but the type-safety and verbosity being a very apt fit for software.

[wbl]

This is really a list of the survivors. Tcl was big in the early 1990's, and Objective-C was around on NeXT and other boxes. Perl was rapidly becoming the glue that holds the web together. Lisp was embedded into a lot of programs, as it is now for extensibility. It's also overstating Fortran's role, which is much like todays niche.

It's very hard to have an objective view of what programming language success and popularity looks like over that long a time, but I think that today there is a much narrower happy path. Either you're a dynamically typed multiparadgram language that's mostly imperative and OO in practice (Ruby, Python, Javascript), a statically typed object imperative language with brackets (C#, Go, Java), or Rust (where a lot of people don't realize how good GCs got instead). Not a ton of Haskell or SML inspired new languages.

By contrast in the 1980-1990s there were serious questions about which of Pascal, C, Objective-C, Smalltalk, C++, was going to win out for the dominant language a system is built in. Stuff like Display PostScript depended in a deep way on exposing programing languages to the engineers who had to work with it that were pretty alien.

[imtringued]

You mean if compiler theorists learned about parallel processing...

[fpgamlirfanboy]

> It sucks, but it’s everywhere and tied into everything.

meh lots of places aren't actually programming system verilog - they're using python/perl to generate it. that's not the same thing.

[kimmeld]

Mangling the quote about regexes… http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

Some people when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use a different language to generate another language.” Now they have two problems.