Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian
programmer and
author
In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...
.
He is best known for his work on the
Go programming language while working at
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
[
]
and the
Plan 9 operating system while working at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
, where he was a member of the
Unix team.
Pike wrote the first
window system for Unix in 1981.
He is the sole inventor named in the US patent for overlapping
windows on a computer display.
With
Brian Kernighan, he 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 character encoding.
Additional works
While at Bell Labs, Pike was also involved in the creation of the
Blit graphical terminal for Unix,
the
Inferno operating system, and the
Limbo programming language.
Pike also developed lesser systems such as the
Newsqueak
Newsqueak is a concurrent programming language for writing application software with interactive graphical user interfaces.
Newsqueak's syntax and semantics are influenced by the C (programming language), C language, but its approach to concurr ...
concurrent programming language and the
vismon program for displaying faces of email authors.
Over the years, Pike has written many text editors;
sam and
acme are the most well known.
Pike started working at Google in 2002.
While there, he was also involved in the creation of the programming language
Sawzall.
[
]
Pike appeared on ''
Late Night with David Letterman'', as a technical assistant to the comedy duo
Penn & Teller.
Personal life
Pike is married to author and illustrator
Renée French; the couple live both in the US and Australia.
[
]
See also
*The plumber – the interprocess communications mechanism used in Plan 9 and Inferno
*
Mark V. Shaney – an artificial Usenet poster designed by Pike
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 clock.
Archive on cat-v.org
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant(a.k.a. utah2000)
slidesps file
Pike's personal homepage
Pike's Google homepage
()
*
{{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