IMO: FPGAs are an interesting beast because they've been inaccessible to a lot of people thanks to the poor and/or expensive tooling and development boards.

That's starting to change slowly and people are getting interested in trying something new.

Well, good development boards are cheaper nowadays, Vivado is slightly better than ISE, but pro tools are still very expensive and, of course, terrible.

Actually, most discussions here in HN are about how bad FPGA tools are.

I'm a CS major switching to EE and it's a logical intersection of the two fields, but hasn't recieved the same amount of attention and hype as the rest of the IoT movement.

Why are you switching to EE? The most interesting questions EE can address are in the CS domain. EE is the past, CS is the future. CS is to EE as Architecture is to knowing how to use a hammer, nails, and a saw. And I say this as an MSEE.

Intel is buying Xilinx, the largest FPGA manufacturer... Why is everyone going DEEP?!:( I thought I could just run my javascript code in a java based browser running in a java VM running inside a VM written in Python. :(

WE NEED MORE HIGH LEVEL STUFF. Not VHDL and whatnot. Coz the hardware will always be 'fast enough', right?

>Intel is buying Xilinx,

I'm going to need a citation for that. The rumor for quite some time has been that Intel was going to buy Altera to integrate some dynamic hardware programmability into their next iteration of Xeon Phi-like compute hardware.

SAME THING. DURR