Think about composing a song (an orchestral piece to be exact). You have beats and there are measures. The entire work has parts that are played by various inst

Think about composing a song (an orchestral piece to be exact). You have beats and there are measures. The entire work has parts that are played by various instruments. The functions you write are melodic lines that are played by individual instruments. However, they all need to be timed in such a way that the whole thing occurs in concert with each other. HDL programming has functional elements (combinatorial logic) that are reasonably declarative in nature. Given this combination of logic bits, produce this set of logical bits as output. There is also a timing sensitive imperative portion alluded to above. This would mirror your standard C programming (routines, finite state machines) but with additional constraints that timing must be accounted for. Imagine concurrent/parallel programming but instead of mutexes, you can control the program flow at a lower level to avoid read/write hazards as appropriate. Of course, verification/testbench software helps validate that the whole thing will operate well on various pieces of hardware (and even take things like temperature into account). There is a bit of knowledge regarding the underlying transistor logic that is helpful but not mandatory (for example, it would explain what metastability is or why a floating impedance consumes more power). It's a bit much for some, but I like it from a pure hobbyist standpoint.