Oh I agree, while writing verilog I was amazed people used it to develop something as critical as ASICs. The language is way too forgiving. And it's not like you can release a patch once the thing is on the silicium unless you're working with FPGAs. It was still very interesting to see how hardware was designed and definitely an enlightening experience as far as I'm concerned.

I found verilog very similar to C in a way, if you're not familiar with all the quirks of the language it's very easy to write code that looks completely benign and straightforward and yet ends up blowing up in your face because of an implicit cast or undefined behaviour...

On the other hand there's not much of a "hacker scene" for driving up the innovation for HDLs, unfortunately. And I don't expect the big companies making ASICs and FPGAs to come up with a radical new solution any time soon.

So basically, if one of you HNers want to try their hand at writing a new programming language, consider designing a modern Verilog instead of yet an other Javascript transpiler :)