I have a background in Electrical Engineering, and when coding in a hardware description language, I feel that instantiating and connecting entities is like drawing a hierarchical schematic but in text mode. And writing the RTL implementation of an entity is like giving requirements to the synthesis tools that I need a bunch of gates and flip flops that implement this functionality. When coding in some programming language, I have a completely different mindset.
Programming usually means coding in some language that will be compiled to machine language, and hardware description is so different kind of "programming" that I think it's dangerous to call it programming at all.