You can program an FPGA in LabVIEW easier and faster than you can with straight toolchains like what Xilinx provides. The problem there is that you're bound to

You can program an FPGA in LabVIEW easier and faster than you can with straight toolchains like what Xilinx provides. The problem there is that you're bound to NI's hardware (which is both the pro and con). But several people are moving to higher-level DSLs, like Chisel. I learned LabVIEW before I learned VHDL. It felt kind of silly learning VHDL when you draw out chips and think about them visually but then have to "compile" them down to VHDL yourself. Mathworks makes visual tools for coding FPGAs as well. I think there's a future for tools that make FPGAs easier to design. > adding comments is enough of a pain that nobody does it Interesting. Adding comments is as easy as double-clicking on the diagrams. It's even nice because you can paste in picture comments easily, from presentations, manuals, references, etc.