@mikeselectricstuff fan of your videos and thanks to them.. I've also decided to go with Lattice as my first foray into CPLD design.
Most of the stuff I am looking to do is on the small chip side and Lattice have about the best sub $20 selection of chips, with some nifty features, easily obtained from mouser.
I picked up one of those bare bone MachX02 boards, was also wondering if you had any experience or thoughts about the FleaFPGA board for little more utility for experimentation? (http://www.fleasystems.com/fleaFPGA.html)
There are many FPGA boards out there, though less for Lattice than Altera & Xilinx - pick whichever has the best fit of add-ons for what you want to do.
I think Lattice do a cheap board for the 4000 series.
That depends on your background. If you have to start from scratch then you'll have a lot to learn. IMHO CPLDs are easier to understand than FPGAs because they have much less logic and timing behaviour depends much less on the amount of logic. With the XC9536XL you can easely look at each resulting output equation to see the 'end result' of your VHDL code.
Maybe in terms of understanding the device, but in terms of learning the process of getting into CPLD/FPGAs, starting with a medium-sized FPGA means not having to worry about device limitations until you get to really big or fast designs.
A CPLD has significant limitations that mean you usually have to have some understanding of the device to get anything nontrivial to fit, or tweak things so they fit when you run out of resources.
With an FPGA you write the code and it will fit. Using a fairly big device means the place/route doesn't have to struggle, so runs fairly fast.
For a learning exercise, my advice would start with a reasonable sized FPGA on a devboard, then look at CPLDs & smaller FPGAs when you need to save cost and/or package size as you get towards a real design or product.