Things are changing tho, some modern FPGAs can be configured by writing to some SRAM, making the process of configuring much quicker. Somen vendors even provid

Things are changing tho, some modern FPGAs can be configured by writing to some SRAM, making the process of configuring much quicker. Somen vendors even provide an OpenCL API/SDK with which you can express your algos at a higher level than VHDL. FPGAs are awesome :)