Robert "Rob" Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian

programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

and

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

. He is best known for his work on the

Go programming language Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is syntactically similar to C, but with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style co ...

and at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

, where he was a member of the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

team and was involved in the creation of the

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...

and Inferno operating systems, as well as the

Limbo programming language Limbo is a programming language for writing distributed systems and is the language used to write applications for the Inferno operating system. It was designed at Bell Labs by Sean Dorward, Phil Winterbottom, and Rob Pike. The Limbo compi ...

. He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike is the sole inventor named in US patent 4,555,775. Over the years Pike has written many text editors; sam and

acme Acme is Ancient Greek (ακμή; English transliteration: ''akmē'') for "the peak", "zenith" or "prime". It may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Acme'' (album), an album by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion * Acme and Septimius, a fictional ...

are the most well known and are still in active use and development. Pike, with

Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co- ...

, is the co-author of ''

The Practice of Programming ''The Practice of Programming'' () by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike is a 1999 book about computer programming and software engineering, published by Addison-Wesley. According to the preface, the book is about "topics like testing, debuggin ...

'' and '' The Unix Programming Environment''. With

Ken Thompson Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programmi ...

he is the co-creator of

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of e ...

. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the

vismon Vismon was the Bell Labs system which displayed authors' faces on one of their internal e-mail systems. The name was a pun on the ''sysmon'' program used at Bell to show the load on computer systems. It can also be interpreted as "visual monitor". ...

program for displaying faces of email authors. Pike also appeared once on ''

Late Night with David Letterman ''Late Night with David Letterman'' is an American late-night talk show hosted by David Letterman on NBC, the first iteration of the ''Late Night'' franchise. It premiered on February 1, 1982, and was produced by Letterman's production compa ...

'', as a technical assistant to the comedy duo

Penn & Teller Penn & Teller, Penn Jillette and Teller, are American magicians, entertainers, and scientific skeptics who have performed together since the late 1970s. They are noted for their ongoing act that combines elements of comedy with magic. The duo h ...

. Pike has worked for

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

since 2002. While at Google, he has been involved in the creation of the programming languages Go and Sawzall. Pike is married to author and illustrator

Renée French Renée French (born 1963) is an American comics writer and illustrator and, under the pen name Rainy Dohaney, a children's book author, and exhibiting artist. Her work is characterized by her "obsessive-looking and highly unsettling visual styl ...

; the couple live in both the US and Australia.

References

External links

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy
– Slides of his presentation at the commemoration of 1000000000 seconds of the Unix cloc
Archive on cat-v.org

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
(a.k.a. utah2000
slides
http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.ps ps file]
Pike's personal homepage

Pike's Google homepage

Pike's page on cat-v.org

Questions and Answers with Rob Pike
by Robin "Roblimo" Miller (published in Slashdot in October 2004)
Interview on informit.com
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206 Another interview]
Interview on infoworld.com

Interview on red-gate.com

Interview on usesthis.com
* (Google Tech Talks May 9, 2007)
Structural Regular Expressions by Rob Pikeslides

The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt text file] * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pike, Rob 1956 births Living people Canadian computer scientists Computer programmers Canadian technology writers Unix people Google employees Plan 9 people Inferno (operating system) people Scientists at Bell Labs Programming language designers

See also

References

External links