Programming has become as much a part of our everyday lives as breathing. Some of us do it; some of us use it; all of us are affected by it. We encounter it when we use an ATM machine, drive a car, check out at the grocery store, and sit in front of the TV or computer. It's interesting and fun to do. Nothing beats the feeling of writing a good application that gets used by many others—it's a source of pride. Nothing feels worse than writing a good application that gets scrapped and never used. Actually, this brings up one of the good points of free software: you write it, put it out on the Web, and people who need it use it; nothing gets put in the bit bucket. Only in the commercial environment can a boss say, “We've decided to abort that project you've been working on for the last six months”--and your work disappears forever.

This month, we let programmers tell us how they work, from programming on clusters to building GUIs with X and Motif—it's all here. Multi-threaded programs are hot and so is Python. Learn how to use the two together; then use LCLint to debug all that new code you've been writing. We also have articles on Palm Pilot development tools and writing a simple plotting program (see “Strictly On-line”). We also talk again to Darryl Strauss to find out what is happening in the world of 3-D graphics.

Some people collect spoons, others collect languages. Eric Raymond collects languages, and his latest find is Python. We've liked Python for a long time and so decided not only to include a feature article on Python in this issue, but also publish an entire supplement devoted to it. That supplement comes to you with this issue. We hope you enjoy it.

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Marjorie Richardson, Editor in Chief