I've been programming for a while now, and I've covered a lot of languages. And this trend that I noticed is that all HDL languages have so painful IDEs!In general, any development environment having some Hardware related development has very crappy UI.I'm talking about uVision, ModelSim, VHDL Simili, Xilinx etc, compared with Netbeans, Eclipse, Visual Studio etc.Why do hardware-guys hate their developers?NOTE: There are exceptions (LABView is awsome!). Can you think of any more?
Why are HDL IDEs so user-unfriendly when compared to generic-purpose language (like Java/C) IDEs?
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It's not that hardware guys hate their developers. It's that they're hardware guys, so they're not really very good at designing or writing software. Most of them simply don't think enough like normal people to produce software that most people will find attractive or easy to use.The other part of it is that most of these tools assume that anybody using them uses them  constantly; the emphasis is primarily on making them easy for an expert to use, as opposed to easy for a beginner to learn. Of course, it's possible to combine the two, but it takes even more of the UI design skills that (as I just pointed out above) they mostly lack. Worse, along with lacking the skills, many think in terms like: only a [insert perjorative term here] would care about changing colors.