FPGAhacker

Every time I see one of these pop up, the thought that software engineers are forever trying to avoid knowledge, understanding, and wisdom with another layer of abstraction comes to mind.

I’m all in favor of a better HDL. Verizon/SystemVerilog is loaded with completely non-obvious landmines. I’ve been doing this so long I forget they are there, but it’s pretty painful seeing someone new to the language step on them. But the alternative, VHDL has largely fallen out of favor in the US.

You would be hard pressed to find a more strongly typed language than VHDL, but damn is it verbose. None of the footguns, but you might get an RSA before you finish typing the code in. If you have ever given Ada a try, VHDL will look pretty familiar.

I know this may be a weird thing for software folks to think about, but writing HDL is a tiny part of digital design. In digital design, if done with discipline, writing the HDL is an almost mechanical process of translating the design. In a design that might take a year, writing the code might be 3 weeks.

Done without discipline you will spend all your time debugging. Wondering why it worked in the lab an hour ago, but after lunch nothing works and you won’t be able to make sense of it.

Understanding basic combinational logic, then sequential logic, followed by state machines (which are the bread and butter of digital design), followed by understanding IO timing and timing constraints (a brain damaged “language” to itself) will take you far.

Domain crossing isn’t so bad if you have those fundamentals.

Then you can spend time learning algorithms other more interesting things. Writing low power software accelerators for neural nets and signal processing.

You can go through all the gyrations of language design in the world, but the language isn’t the hard part. There is a huge amount of improvement to be done, no doubt. But digital design is not the language.

If you want to make the world of digital design a better place, more open, easier to break into, work on tools, not languages. I’d give a kidney for an open source timing diagrammer that could do simple setup and hold checks, create derived signals through Boolean combinations of other signals, and emulate a flop.

I’d do it, but I’ve tried and programming a gui is about the most painful thing I’ve done on a computer. So much work for so little payoff.

And yet, you create more noise.

It used to be MHz and GHz, then when that stalled, advertising nm became a thing. It can change.

Angstrom is kind of a fun word, so I’m sure a few nodes will be named after that.

Exactly what he said.

It’s a marketing number and has been for many years.

What is a DC transformer?

I remember when it came out because a friend was excited about it. As I recall it’s a pretty large book.

Edit: just under 1200 pages on Amazon. I never got into it because I couldn’t figure out what the big revelation was supposed to be. It would take some serious dedication to go through such a large book for the sake of an unfavorable review.

I take wolfram’s words at face value.

Is there something wrong there? I’m sorry if I’m being dense.

Did he really say that? My quick search didn’t turn anything up.

I don’t find him insufferable but I also haven’t paid much attention to him.

From what I gather of other people’s comments, they are often bothered by his apparently pervasive discussion of himself and his life.

I’ve never met the man, but the few interviews I’ve see or read about him I thought were pretty interesting.

The worst part is q: is a different command. so if you are trying to :q and miss the colon and try again, you run some other damn f*cking command.

I've been using vi variants for decades and didn't know ZZ or ZQ. This solves a major pain point for me (mis-typing :q, trying again, now I'm off in the weeds).

This looks like some kind of joke from the Simpsons.

I think this is not a great name for a product that isn’t developing silicon.

It was Microsoft’s strategy for several decades (outsiders called it embrace, extend, extinguish, only partially in jest). It can work for some companies.

wait, Memoji is still a thing?