Nationality Canadian Name Rob Pike Occupation Software engineer Role Software Engineer | Spouse Renee French Website herpolhode.com/rob/ | |
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Books The Practice of Programming, The Unix Programming Environment Similar People Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer, Dennis Ritchie, Renee French | ||
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Robert "Rob" Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work 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.
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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 AT&T's US patent 4,555,775 or "backing store patent" that is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first software patents.
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 images of 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 is married to Renée French, and currently works for Google, where he is involved in the creation of the programming languages Go and Sawzall.
