When I took Berkeley's EECS151 class (Introduction to Digital Design and Integrated Circuits), the first lecture actually did not go over clocks. Instead, it go

When I took Berkeley's EECS151 class (Introduction to Digital Design and Integrated Circuits), the first lecture actually did not go over clocks. Instead, it goes over the simple building blocks of circuits - inverters, logic gates, and finally combinational logic blocks that are made up of the previous two. These components alone do not need a clock to function, and their static functions are merely subject to the physical limitations such as the speed of electrons, which we package into something called propagation delay. It is entirely possible to build clockless circuits, otherwise known as asynchronous circuits. From the perspective of an electrical engineer and computer scientist, asynchronous circuits theoretically can be faster and more efficient. Without the restraint of a clock slowing down an entire circuit for its slowest component, asynchronous circuits can instead operate as soon as data is available, while consuming less power to overhead functions such as generating the clock and powering components that are not changing state. However, asynchronous circuits are largely the plaything of researchers, and the vast majority of today's circuits are synchronous (clocked). The reason why we use synchronous circuits, which may relate to the reason why many students learning circuits often try to make circuits without clocks, is because of abstraction. Clocked circuits can have individual components/stages developed and analyzed separately. You leave problems that do not pertain to the function of a circuit such as data availability and stability to the clock of the overall circuit (clk-to-q delay, hold delay, etc), and can focus on functionality within an individual stage. As well, components of a circuit can be analyzed by tools we've built to automate the difficult parts of circuit design, such as routing, power supply and heat dissipation, etc. This makes developing complex circuits with large teams of engineers "easier." The abstraction of synchronous circuits is one step above asynchronous circuits. Without a clock, asynchronous circuits can run into problems where outputs of components are actually wrong for a brief moment of time due to race conditions, a problem which synchronous circuit design stops by holding information between stages stable until everything is ready to go. The article's point of hardware design beginning with the clock is useful when you are trying to teach software engineers, who are used to thinking in a synchronous, ordered manner, about practical hardware design which is done entirely with clocks. However, it is not the complete picture when trying to create understanding of electrical engineering from the ground up. Synchronous circuits are built from asynchronous circuits, which were built from our understanding of E&M physics. Synchronous circuits are then used to build our ASICs, FPGAs, and CPUs that power our routers and computers, which run instructions based on ISA's that we compile down to from higher order languages. It's hardly surprising that engineers who are learning hardware design build clockless circuits - they aren't wrong for designing something "simple" and correct, even if it isn't currently practical. They're just operating on the wrong level of abstraction, which they should have a cursory knowledge of so synchronous circuits make sense to them.