You can definitely argue the toss about paradigms, since things tend to kind of overlap and blur into each other unless you're careful. It's true, if you want a

You can definitely argue the toss about paradigms, since things tend to kind of overlap and blur into each other unless you're careful. It's true, if you want a synthesisable design you need to meet timing. However, once you meet timing you can assume your ticks are instantaneous. I would argue that for me, there is still a somewhat similar feel to the parts of HDL that don't feel like hardware design e.g. creating pipelines. This is a limitation of hardware rather than the programming language per-se. This type of imprecision seems common when talking of programming (language) paradigms: are they based on languages in an idealised world, execution environments, language ecosystems, APIs exposed by the operating system? We can only really talk about them in an exact sense when we work in an artificial environment as in Roy and Haridi. Given the inherent imprecision, I don't see why when we deal with real systems, we shouldn't bend definitions a little bit and say a language "sort-of" or "mostly" exhibits a certain paradigm.