I must say that I have mostly enjoyed editing this magazine. Working via e-mail from Australia was often a challenge. Some issues I feel I could have polished better with a bit more effort. But an occasional kind word from a reader goes a long way in this business. The hardest part for me is reading the other kind of letters. I find that a little criticism also goes a long way. The trick is not to overreact, in either direction.

R&D seems to be prospering as well, at least from my vantage point as a semi-insider. Besides The C Users Journal, they also put out several other quality technical publications. (These are not as important as CUJ, of course, but you might want to check them out anyway.) And they run The C Users' Group and The C Users Bookstore, two valuable services. I expect all of these endeavors to become more important as the C community grows.

In the early 1970s, that community was confined to two floors of one building at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey. To say that it has grown is the grossest of understatements. C is ubiquitous. It is probably the programming language in widest use today. We all know that C is not perfect. That's one reason why people keep tinkering with it and extending it. But the list of successful products written in C keeps growing.

Not all my reflections on past and future are equally rosy. Certainly, the world is wallowing through times of economic uncertainty. Not even the rapidly growing computer business is immune to setbacks. And economic hard times have a way of depressing everything else.

Still, it's a new year. I can't help but look on the coming months with optimism, at least for CUJ, R&D, and C. I hope you can too.

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.uunet