My experience with most "neo HDLs" is that they are all code generators which make the tedious part easy and don't really end up touching the hard part. This may be the first HDL I've seen that attempts to move the needle on catching bugs at compile time. (I've worked with several engineers, on hardware bugs which turned out to be pipelining errors, who did not understand what I meant by "make this design error inexp…
I’m all in favor of a better HDL. Verizon/SystemVerilog is loaded with completely non-obvious landmines. I’ve been doing this so long I forget they are there, but it’s pretty painful seeing someone new to the language step on them. But the alternative, VHDL has largely fallen out of favor in the US.
You would be hard pressed to find a more strongly typed language than VHDL, but damn is it verbose. None of the footguns, but you might get an RSA before you finish typing the code in. If you have ever given Ada a try, VHDL will look pretty familiar.
I know this may be a weird thing for software folks to think about, but writing HDL is a tiny part of digital design. In digital design, if done with discipline, writing the HDL is an almost mechanical process of translating the design. In a design that might take a year, writing the code might be 3 weeks.
Done without discipline you will spend all your time debugging. Wondering why it worked in the lab an hour ago, but after lunch nothing works and you won’t be able to make sense of it.
Understanding basic combinational logic, then sequential logic, followed by state machines (which are the bread and butter of digital design), followed by understanding IO timing and timing constraints (a brain damaged “language” to itself) will take you far.
Domain crossing isn’t so bad if you have those fundamentals.
Then you can spend time learning algorithms other more interesting things. Writing low power software accelerators for neural nets and signal processing.
You can go through all the gyrations of language design in the world, but the language isn’t the hard part. There is a huge amount of improvement to be done, no doubt. But digital design is not the language.
If you want to make the world of digital design a better place, more open, easier to break into, work on tools, not languages. I’d give a kidney for an open source timing diagrammer that could do simple setup and hold checks, create derived signals through Boolean combinations of other signals, and emulate a flop.
I’d do it, but I’ve tried and programming a gui is about the most painful thing I’ve done on a computer. So much work for so little payoff.