> If you wanted your program to perform well, you'd have to write C that was, more or less, a translation of assembly that you'd constructed in your head first.

Maybe in really old compilers

> You don't write programs with it, you describe hardware with it

Which is fair enough, but it seems the "hardware description" pretends to be of a higher-level than it really is.

If you need the user to describe gates and flip-flops and how they connect then make them describe this.