I did some VHDL in school when I was doing a computer engineering degree. We came at it from underneath, as it were -- we'd done a fair number of classes on digital logic and VLSI design. So the way we wrote it felt like describing hardware (hence the name, Hardware Description Language) rather than writing software. That being said, it had a lot of affordances we didn't use, that would have made it feel a lot more like a programming language. Unlike a programming language, though, you're acutely aware of the cost. Every line costs you surface area / FPGA gates, and if your HDL is too big, it won't fit in the IC you want to program.