Everyone else will be diligently reporting about Gary Smith said at DAC this year, so you wont find that here.
For almost as long as I can remember, Gary Smith has stood up at DAC, either with Gartner or with his own company and started DAC off by saying that next year is the year that ESL will finally take off. This year was different. He did not mention ESL at all. Mary Olsson talked about the myths and realities of 3D TSV and Gary talked about how EDA needs to work on productivity so that companies can make money with chip design again. He did not say that ESL was the answer, he did not talk about how ESL can affect productivity, he did talk about synthesis, implying RTL synthesis, is perhaps the biggest bottleneck in the process. So by not singling out ESL, we are led to two possible conclusions: