Component programming is one of the key developments in practical software engineering in the last decade. Large companies successfully use component programming in building and deploying complex software systems. The open-source community, however, has mostly ignored it. In this talk, Mark Hammond gives his perspective on component programming, what it is, how it's done, and why Python programmers may benefit from learning more about it. He also describes his implementations of bridges between Python and three different component models: Microsoft's COM and .NET, and Mozilla's XPCOM.