Rob Pike (b. 1956) is a software engineer 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 and Inferno operating systems and the "Blit" terminal (hardware).

Over the years he has written many text editors, Sam and Acme are the most well known and still in active use and development.

Pike also appeared once on The Late Show with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn and Teller. 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 putting the faces of authors in internal email.

Pike, a Canadian citizen, currently works for Google.

Quotes

"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck." - on the X Window System

"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." - circa 1991

"Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing."

See also

• Mark V Shaney
• The Sam text editor
• Acme: A User Interface for Programmers
• The Plumber

External links

• Pike's Bell Labs homepage
• Pike's current homepage