He is right in the sense that for someone from a programming background, using FPGAs is far harder than it could be. I have looked into it a few times and it is

He is right in the sense that for someone from a programming background, using FPGAs is far harder than it could be. I have looked into it a few times and it is indeed horrible. It looks to me like a typical situation of legacy tools and some degree of oligopoly. I imagine a hardware person going into programming would have a similar experience (in reverse).