I'm sure there are similar tools for other languages. It requires you to program in a slightly different way (certain operations aren't optimal for FPGAs), but is extremely user-friendly.
At the company I work for, all FPGA programming is done in MATLAB. Unfortunately I work in a different department so I can't give you any technical details, but from what I understand, no one has written things directly to HDL in years.
It depends on what you are doing. There are tools in the Xilinx tool set enabling you to design filters or other things in MATLAB Simulink, which are very convenient. But if you want to write a processor, however small, you cannot really do that well. Because the hard part is getting a good design with proper timing and synchronization between different parts. I think it's harder to get such a good design using MATLAB/C to HDL tools than it is designing directly in HDL.
What???? There is a very mature set of tool for converting MATLAB to HDL.
http://www.mathworks.com/products/hdl-coder/
http://www.mathworks.com/products/hdl-verifier/
http://www.mathworks.com/products/filterhdl/
I'm sure there are similar tools for other languages. It requires you to program in a slightly different way (certain operations aren't optimal for FPGAs), but is extremely user-friendly.
At the company I work for, all FPGA programming is done in MATLAB. Unfortunately I work in a different department so I can't give you any technical details, but from what I understand, no one has written things directly to HDL in years.