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BuGless:
There has been already a few decades of research effort in "further generation" languages/environments often called "high level synthesis, behavioral synthesis, system level synthesis...", some with schematics input or representation. Unfortunately, I do not know very much people or organizations that have actually used them. This is mainly because the underlying assumptions for such systems are too constraining.
I invite other people on the forum to inform about real succes-stories here, that still live on today and outside an academic research environment
For restricted application areas the above mentioned higher level design methods have found a practical way out. This is especially the case with DSP (digital signal processing). A number of succesful tools are coupled to a high level graphics interface. Systems making use of a high-level schematics for the design of DSP systems are: "DSP-Builder" of Altera and "System-Generator" of Xilinx.
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The trend to market tools for automated hdl(design acceleration) indeed started a decade or so ago with claims that were proven to be false.
In fact, xilinx initial blockset turned out to be a backward approach towards schematic !
Currently, the universities are flooded with cheap promotional design products while the industry remains on the watch. Few attempts at their industrial use have been made and the verdict is that it may work for some tasks but produces unmanagable code.
The idea itself is still questionable. Can we really have a tool that will design from higher abstraction in a multitude of applications, variations, modifications, secondary costs ..etc.
The other question is that if the produced code is unmanagable why not then just abandon hdl and design straight from software to fpga bypassing hdl.
surely some tasks in hdl that may take days may be finished in few seconds
in software. This is the major hdl drawback.
At the moment, I believe some companies considered acceleration tools seriously for designs that were deemed to be impossible to be done by human.
Let us not mix up between code created by these tools and code generated by "others" e.g. IPs or legacy work or your friend's module. In this second category the code is simply done by a designer or a specific tool subset that is well tailored for its purpose. Surely IPs are very useful in the industry.
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