Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language while working at Google[1][2] and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team.[1]
Rob Pike
| |
|---|---|
Rob Pike at OSCON 2010
| |
| Born | 1956 (age 67–68) |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater |
|
| Occupation | Software engineer |
| Known for | Plan 9, UTF-8, Go |
| Spouse | Renée French |
| Website | herpolhode |
Pike wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981.[3][non-primary source needed] He is the sole inventor named in the US patent for overlapping windows on a computer display.[4]
With Brian Kernighan, he is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment.[1] With Ken Thompson, he is the co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding.[1]
While at Bell Labs, Pike was also involved in the creation of the Blit graphical terminal for Unix,[5] the Inferno operating system, and the Limbo programming language.[1] Pike also developed lesser systems such as the Newsqueak concurrent programming language[6] and the vismon program for displaying faces of email authors.[7]
Over the years, Pike has written many text editors; sam[8] and acme are the most well known.[citation needed]
Pike started working at Google in 2002.[1] While there, he was also involved in the creation of the programming language Sawzall.[9]
Pike appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn & Teller.[3][non-primary source needed]
Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live both in the US and Australia.[10]
