It doesn't have to be. I once made a julia->verilog transpiler that even recompiled your julia functions with verilator, so you could verify that the code was correct.

https://github.com/interplanetary-robot/Verilog.jl

Of course, gaining traction on something like this is tricky.

I actually think Erlang/BEAM would be a great choice for making EDA tools, because it has concurrent execution model that you could probably very easily make play nice in rudimentary simulations of circuits that have triggers (`always @` sort of stuff.