It's so criminal and just rank ass terrible for this <i>amazing</i> segment of computing that it is - by and large - locked up behind incredibly hard to negotiate expensive software packages and solutions.<p>This is totally the gateway to seeing & understanding what computing actually is. And there are <i>outstanding</i> and fantastic chips with all kinds of capability on offer.<p>But almost universally they require very expensive obtuse custom/proprietary software to do anything at all. And two thirds the features on the chip require expensive IP add-ons to use from there.<p>It's just so so so unfortunate what a ceiling there is on adoption for fpgas. So much capability and so little ability for an empoweredearned community to form around such amazing power. There's something deeply scary to me especially about how, with fpga and RISC-V chip design in general, digital logic is cheap and plentiful, but as soon as you want interconnect or memory or io, as soon as you are looking beyond the scope of what you can do inside the scope of a chip, it's $$$ galore to buy ways to talk to the outside world, that open chip design & progress is strong but only in the confines of the digital domain.