I think we have succeeded at software IC's beyond our wildest dreams at the time: standard, third party components with mostly understood behaviors, documents, and catalogs to obtain them.
Almost everything except C has web loadable modules and online docs (analogous to IC data sheets in retrospect!) at this point, whether it's Perl's CPAN (going back to 1995) or Gems or MVN or whatever through obvious L-Pad disasters and now containers and various Hubs.
edit. What we didn't dream of when the Byte Smalltalk issue came out (should NOT have tossed mine :-) was the implications of networked module repos. Add one or two lines of code and the system goes out and gets a standard module and wires it in for you. This was not on the menu for people shopping for 74xx at Radio Shack and Digikey.
Almost everything except C has web loadable modules and online docs (analogous to IC data sheets in retrospect!) at this point, whether it's Perl's CPAN (going back to 1995) or Gems or MVN or whatever through obvious L-Pad disasters and now containers and various Hubs.
edit. What we didn't dream of when the Byte Smalltalk issue came out (should NOT have tossed mine :-) was the implications of networked module repos. Add one or two lines of code and the system goes out and gets a standard module and wires it in for you. This was not on the menu for people shopping for 74xx at Radio Shack and Digikey.