This is such an important notion. Another I try to explain hardware design for people coming from a software background: You get one choice to put down in har

This is such an important notion. Another I try to explain hardware design for people coming from a software background: You get one choice to put down in hardware as many functions as you want. You cannot change any of them later. All you can do later is sequence them in whatever order you need to accomplish your goal. If you think of it this way, you realize that the clock is critical (that's what makes sequencing possible), and re-use of fixed functions introduces you to hardware sharing, pipelining, etc. But it's hard to grasp.