While I partially agree with you're saying (VHDL is hard to write well; thinking in parallel is hard), I'm not sure I can completely agree. In it current textual form, you are probably right, but with a visual programming frontend, I think a dataflow language like ANI may actually be easier to program than a standard sequential program in a traditional language.

Why do I think this? Because visual dataflow languages have been very successful as programming tools for non-programmers in niche areas. Eg, in music production: Puredata, MAX/MSP, Syntmaker, Reaktor; in 3D modeling (at least Blender has a dataflow-esque language for describing the render passes, but I've seen other visualization/graphics programs use datalow-like visual programming languages); in game development tools (I've seen at least three commercial engines which use some form of dataflow-esque visual programming language for describing shaders, AI and probably other things); the scientific community has LabVIEW. I'm sure theres others too (not exactly non-programmers, but the defense/aerospace industries have SCADE).

Of course, coming up with an intuitive, yet sophisticated enough to do real programs in, visual representation and GUI interface would still be a difficult task and I certainly agree that for a textual programming langauge, your comment is probably correct.

Agreed. Dataflow is hard to program. A classic Verilog example:

  always @(posedge clk) begin
    b <= a;
    a <= b;
  end

You know how SW developers like the teaser of swapping words... This is how HW people do it (and of course, if you had used a regular assignment "=" instead of the non-blocking one "<=", the swap would fail).