Rob Pike

Robert C. Pike ( born 1956 ) is a Canadian software developer and author. He is known for his work at Bell Labs. There he was a member of the Unix team and was instrumental in the development of operating systems, Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno, as well as the programming language Limbo.

In addition, he was co-developer of Blit, a graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote in 1981, the first window system for Unix.

Over the years he has written many text editors; sam and acme are the best known and are still actively used and developed.

Pike, along with Brian Kernighan author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment ( German title: . The Unix toolbox Programming with Unix). Together with Ken Thompson, he is also co-developer of UTF -8. Pike also developed less important systems, including vismon the program with which you could see the faces of e- mail senders.

Pike also appeared once on The Late Show with David Letterman as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn and Teller.

For fun, Pike claimed that in 1980 he won a silver medal in archery at the Summer Olympics; However, Canada boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics.

Pike is married to Renée French and is currently working for Google Inc., where he was the development of the programming language Go is dedicated to.