Introduction
Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author.
Life and works
He is best known for his work on the Go programming language and, earlier, 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 at Google from 2002 to 2021 when he retired. While at Google, he has been involved in the creation of the programming languagesGo and Sawzall.
Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live in both the US and Australia.