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It goes beyond being inefficient. It's the wrong mental model. Chip designers intuitively visualize interconnected blocks of logic. They draw rectangles with w
by alain94040 3y ago
It goes beyond being inefficient. It's the wrong mental model.
Chip designers intuitively visualize interconnected blocks of logic. They draw rectangles with wires between them.
To learn this intuition, writing spaghetti Verilog code that runs in a simulator is counter-productive. It's a common mistake that people coming from a software background make all the time, and that has been discussed to death. So with some appeal to authority, trust us and learn proper hardware design, hopefully it will be more rewarding and will "click" faster.
- imtringued 3y agoI don't understand where this sentiment is coming from. I have seen so many logs on HN that tryo to explain the "gotcha" difference between hardware and software and I don't understand who they are targeting. For me it is obvious that VHDL maps to hardware. When I got to actually writing VHDL I was like "where is the gotcha? These people lied to me. Hardware works exactly like hardware!". It feels condescending to read on the internet how hardware engineers clain that software engineers don't know how hardware works. Any kid that has played around with Redstone intuitively knows the difference and in fact children are more likely to have extensive experience with hardware than with software because most games have some sort of logic gate system but only a tiny minority lets you program unless the entire game is based around programming.