But I also think that to do hardware design in VHDL or Verilog, you need to understand the underlying structures - latches, flip-flops, decoders, muxes, etc.
Only barely. Modern FPGAs are made up of LUTs and flip-flops, which can be abstracted as "cloud of programmable asynchronous logic surrounded by D Flip-Flops". I think if you start by explaining the abstract notion of asynchronous logic, and the notion of gating a design using D flip-flops, you can get someone up the HDL learning curve really fast without going into the depths of what boolean functions are, what a mux is, etc. Boolean functions and muxes aren't a central component of modern programmable logic anyway.
I've been thinking about writing up "30 minutes to your first HDL design" at some point. Dragging a competent C programmer up the learning curve is pretty easy, as long as you don't start off with "it's like C but...". I've trained a few SE interns to write some halfway-decent CPLD designs in just an hour or two, and consequently I think that the way they've taught it at school is way too low-level for someone that's going to be working with modern programmable logic, and it needn't be so painful.
Only barely. Modern FPGAs are made up of LUTs and flip-flops, which can be abstracted as "cloud of programmable asynchronous logic surrounded by D Flip-Flops". I think if you start by explaining the abstract notion of asynchronous logic, and the notion of gating a design using D flip-flops, you can get someone up the HDL learning curve really fast without going into the depths of what boolean functions are, what a mux is, etc. Boolean functions and muxes aren't a central component of modern programmable logic anyway.
I've been thinking about writing up "30 minutes to your first HDL design" at some point. Dragging a competent C programmer up the learning curve is pretty easy, as long as you don't start off with "it's like C but...". I've trained a few SE interns to write some halfway-decent CPLD designs in just an hour or two, and consequently I think that the way they've taught it at school is way too low-level for someone that's going to be working with modern programmable logic, and it needn't be so painful.