Until June 2002, e was a proprietary language owned by Verisity Design Inc.; it became a public standard with the initiation of the P1647 standards project in June 2002. An imperative object-oriented language with concurrency, e can generate constrained random values, check functional coverage, and check temporal properties (assertions). However, e goes beyond the traditional OO capabilities by adding aspect-oriented programming, thus enabling the development of orthogonal aspects as a way of rapidly creating complex models. This brief description discusses recent activity with respect to the IEEE standardization of e and its importance in the verification of today's large, complex systems.