When I was writing the chips from nand2tetris in HDL I noticed how cleanly they could be expressed with function composition in SML. I dismissed the ideas as a bit weird, if cool, but after a few weeks I came across HardCaml http://www.ujamjar.com/hardcaml/ and some references to HML (Hardware ML). Unfortunately only the thesis survives and not any actual code, but still.

The moral of the story is to take your weird ideas more seriously I guess ;-)