Rob Pike
Computer programmer and co-creator of Go / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert "Rob" Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language and 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.
Rob Pike | |
|---|---|
 Rob Pike at OSCON 2010 | |
| Born | 1956 (age 66–67) |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Software engineer |
| Known for | Plan 9, UTF-8, Go |
| Spouse | Renée French |
| Website | herpolhode |
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.[1]
Over the years Pike has written many text editors; sam[2] 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 faces of email authors.
Pike also appeared once on Late Night with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn & Teller.
Pike worked at Google from 2002 to 2021 when he retired.[3] While at Google, he has been involved in the creation of the programming languages Go and Sawzall.[4]
Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live in both the US and Australia.[5]