Verilog has come as long way since it started at Gateway Design Automation in 1984 . It is now used extensively in the design of integrated circiuts and digital systems.
Verilog has been designed to be intuitive and simple to learn, this is why a programmer may see many similarities between Verilog and other popular languages like pascal and C.
Verilog can closely simulate real circuits using built-in primitives, user-defined primitives, timing checks, pin-to-pin delay simulation and the ability to apply external stimulus to designs enabling testing before synthesis.
The extention which made Verilog really take off was the Synthesis technology introduced in 1987. This, coupled with Verilog's ability to extensively verify a digital design, enabled quick hardware design.