Rob Pike

Rob Pike in 2001

Robert C. Pike (* 1956 ) is a Canadian software developer and author . He is known for his work at Bell Labs . There he was a member of the Unix team and played a key role in the development of the Plan 9 operating systems from Bell Labs and Inferno, as well as the Limbo programming language .

He was also a co-developer of Blit, a graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981 .

Over the years he has written many text editors; sam and acme are the best known and are still actively used and developed.

Together with Brian Kernighan, Pike is the author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment (German title: Der Unix Werkzeugkasten. Programming with Unix ). Together with Ken Thompson he is also a co-developer of UTF-8 . Pike also developed less important systems, including the program vismon , which could be used to display the faces of e-mail senders.

Pike also appeared once on The Late Show with David Letterman as the technical assistant for comedy duo Penn and Teller .

For fun, Pike claimed that he won a silver medal in archery at the 1980 Summer Olympics ; however, Canada boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics.

Pike is married and currently works for Google Inc. , where he is developing the Go programming language .

Web links

Commons : Rob Pike - collection of images, videos and audio files

Rob Pike's google home page
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 (utah2000) slides (PDF; 28 kB).
Robin "Roblimo" Miller: Questions and Answers with Rob Pike . In: Slashdot, October 2004.
Video: Concurrency / message passing Newsqueak , Google Tech Talks, May 9, 2007.
Structural Regular Expressions by Rob Pike.
Blog commandcenter.blogspot.com.