Rob Pike

Rob C. Pike
Rob Pike at OSCON 2010
Born	1956 (age 64–65)
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	University of Toronto (BS) California Institute of Technology
Occupation	Software engineer
Employer	Google
Known for	Plan 9, UTF-8, Go
Spouse(s)	Renée French
Website	herpolhode.com/rob/

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.^[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 works for Google, where he is involved in the creation of the programming languages Go and Sawzall.^[3]

Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live in both the US and Australia.^[4]