Rob Pike

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Rob Pike
Born	1956
Nationality	Canadian
Occupation	Software engineer
Employer	Google
Known for	Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno, Limbo, UTF-8
Website
herpolhode.com/rob/

Robert C. Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian software engineer and author. He is best known for his work at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language.

He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike was the applicant for AT&T patent number 4555775 or "backing store patent" that is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first software patents. ^[1]

Over the years Pike has written many text editors; sam and acme are the most well known and are still in active use and development.

Pike, with Brian Kernighan, is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment. With Ken Thompson he is the co-creator of UTF-8. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the vismon program for displaying images of faces of email authors.

Pike also appeared once on Late Night with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn and Teller.

As a joke Pike claims to have won the 1980 Olympic silver medal in Archery;^[2] however, Canada boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics.

Pike is married to Renée French, and currently works for Google, where he was involved in the creation of the programming language Go.

See also

• The Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.
• Acme: A User Interface for Programmers
• The Plumber
• The Sam text editor
• Mark V Shaney
• The Unix Programming Environment (1984 with Brian Kernighan)
• Go (programming language)
• Sawzall

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Rob Pike

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy - Slides of his presentation at the commemoration of 1000000000 seconds of the Unix clock.
• Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka utah2000) slides
• Pike's personal homepage
• Pike's Google homepage
• Questions and Answers with Rob Pike - by Robin "Roblimo" Miller (published in Slashdot in October 2004)
• Video: Concurrency/message passing Newsqueak (Google Tech Talks May 9, 2007)
• Structural Regular Expressions by Rob Pike slides.
• The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike