Robert "Rob" C. 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.
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.
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 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 for Google from 2002 until his retirement in 2021.
While at Google, he was involved in the creation of the programming languages  Go and Sawzall.
Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live in both 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
Pike's page on cat-v.org
Pike's page on C archive
Questions and Answers with Rob Pike by Robin "Roblimo" Miller (published in Slashdot in October 2004)
Interview on informit.comAnother interview
Interview on infoworld.com
Interview on red-gate.com
Interview on usesthis.com
(Google Tech Talks May 9, 2007)
Structural Regular Expressions by Rob Pike slides
The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Piketext file
